Did U.S. President Donald Trump write on Truth Social that he regretted taking "advise" from tech billionaire Elon Musk, and affirm that there was no "white genocide" in South Africa? No, that's not true: A screenshot shared widely in July 2025 was digitally edited. An archive of the president's account on Truth Social showed that such a post never existed.
The claim appeared in a post (archived here) published on X on July 1, 2025. It included what appeared to be a screenshot of a Truth Social post by Trump, which consisted of the following text:
I regret taking advise from Elon
Don't be a PANICAN (A new party based on Weak and Stupid people!)
There is no white genocide in 🇿🇦
This is what the post looked like on X at the time of writing:
(Source: X screenshot by Lead Stories)
The Trump post was fake.
As seen here (archived here) and here (archived here), searches for textual fragments from the post attributed to Trump on an archive of his Truth Social posts did not produce any matches.
A search on Google News for the keywords seen here (archived here) yielded no entries.
(Source: Google News screenshot by Lead Stories)
Trump once used the word "panican" (archived here) on Truth Social, but that happened in April 2025, and that post was written in the context of tariffs (archived here) and made no mention of Musk, genocide or South Africa.
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Other Lead Stories fact checks mentioning Donald Trump are here.
Articles concerning claims about South Africa can be found here.
