Is a video of President Trump threatening to "erase Pakistan" if it attacks India authentic? No, that's not true: The video uses old footage of Trump from before he was President and added an AI generated audio track. In the fake audio Trump can also be heard saying he will "warn China" and that he loves "Indian people".
The video appeared in an Instagram post (archived here) published on May 1, 2025. It featured Trump apparently saying:
I don't want war, I want peace. But if Pakistan attacks India, I will support India, erase Pakistan and warn China. I love Indian people.
This is the video in question:
Lead Stories ran the video through the online AI-detection platform Hive Moderation. It found the video was 98 percent "likely to contain AI-generated or deepfake content. These results are shown in the screenshot below:
The Media Forensics Lab at State University of New York/Buffalo operates DeepFake-O-Meter, which offers a variety of image, video and audio analysis tools. Several of their tools also indicated the audio in the clip was AI generated:
The video in the clip appears to have come from a luncheon hosted by the Economic Club of New York as reported by MSNBC in 2016 (archived here) that shows the same background. The description of the clip still refers to Donald Trump as "presidential nominee" because he hadn't been elected President at that time yet:
During a luncheon hosted by the Economic Club of New York, Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump outlined his economic plans, including 4% growth and tax relief for the working and middle classes.
A Google News search for the word "Trump" in combination with "India erase Pakistan" returned no results (archived here). If President Trump really had made the comment it would have very likely been covered by international media.
Other Lead Stories fact checks about deepfake audio and video can be found here.
