Did U.S. President Donald Trump post a meme of Winnie the Pooh on X to troll China's Xi Jinping in 2025? No, that's not true: Lead Stories manually reviewed Trump's account on X and did not find the image social media alleged he published. No credible media organization reported the purported news.
The claim appeared in a post (archived here) published on X on April 8, 2025. It opened:
LMFAOOOOO.
The post contained what seemed to be a screenshot of Trump's post that shared an image of the anthropomorphic cartoon character Winnie-the-Pooh resembling the Chinese leader.
This is what the entry reviewed in this fact check looked like on X at the time of writing:
(Source: X screenshot by Lead Stories)
The claim went viral in light of another round of U.S. tariff increases (archived here) announced (archived here) by the White House on April 8, 2025. That placed imports from China under a 104% tariff.
The Chinese government moved to censor (archived here) images of the cartoon character on social media in 2017 after a wave of memes comparing Xi Jinping to Winnie the Pooh.
The profile picture, the color of the checkmark and the overall design of what looked like a "screenshot" of Trump's post did not match any of his other social media accounts, except for the one on X.
Lead Stories manually reviewed Trump's account on X for the period between his second inauguration and this writing and did not find the post with the image in question.
Furthermore, a search across the account of the Chinese Embassy in the U.S. (archived here) showed that it only tagged Trump's account twice: Both entries were published in 2024 and, unlike the "screenshot," contained more text than just a single mention of @realDonaldTrump. That was another inconsistency casting doubts on the authenticity of the "screenshot".
A search across Google News for the keywords seen here (archived here) did not show any credible reports confirming that Trump published the meme during his second presidency.
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Other Lead Stories fact checks mentioning Donald Trump can be found here.
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