Did Hungarian opposition leader Péter Magyár, who is challenging sitting Prime Minister Viktor Orbán in the April 2026 election, describe U.S. President Donald Trump as "a senile grandpa" in a public speech? No, that's not true: The claim originated from a fake report that stole the logo of Euronews, a real news organization, in an apparent attempt to make the claim more believable. The viral clip reused footage of a real rally without the original sound. The full recording of the event showed that Magyár didn't say what social media posts attributed to him.
The claim appeared in a post (archived here and here) by @SprinterPress
published on X on March 24, 2026. It read:
Hungarian candidate Péter Magyar openly attacks President Trump as a senile grandpa before stating he will dismantle the existing US nuclear and defense cooperation arrangements. This threatens all future US-Hungary relations.
https://euronews.us.com/my-europe/2026...
The entry included a video with the following voice-over:
On March 22, speaking at a campaign event in Nagykanizsa, Hungarian opposition leader Péter Magyár sharply attacked U.S. President Donald Trump, questioning his confidence and character. At this point, Donald Trump sounds like a senile grandpa who keeps forgetting where he is. He can't be trusted. 'When I'm elected prime minister, Hungary and even Europe as a whole may be better off distancing themselves from that kind of instability coming out of the United States,' Magyár said.
He also mentioned that after his victory on April 12, Hungary would withdraw from its recent deals with the U.S., including the February 2026 nuclear energy cooperation agreement and the 2019 U.S.-Hungary defense cooperation agreement. Magyár added that, under his leadership, Hungary would strike better deals with EU partners, particularly Germany and France.
This is how the video appeared on X at the time of writing:
(Image source: post by @SprinterPress on X.com.)
The video displayed the Euronews logo, but that wasn't an authentic report aired by the pan-European television network weeks ahead of the April 12, 2026, parliamentary election (archived here) in which Orbán will face Magyár, a leader of the opposition party Tisza.
The clip reviewed in this fact check did not show Magyár saying the sentence about a "senile grandpa" -- that quote was read by a female narrator.
A Google search across the Euronews website for the keywords seen here did not show the report in question:
(Image source: Google.)
A separate search (archived here) on the Euronews website for "senile grandpa" also produced no relevant matches:
(Image source: Euronews.)
In addition to generic U.S.-related b-roll, the clip included several shots of Magyár speaking at one specific rally in front of a banner with a large letter "O":
(Image source: InVid.)
A reverse image search led to the original footage (archived here) of that event. It was published on Magyár's account on YouTube on March 22, 2026. In that video, the candidate spoke from the stage between the 4:00 and 1:13:35 marks.
When translated to English by Chrome, the automatic transcript showed no mentions of a "senile grandpa" in his speech:
(Image source: post on YouTube.)
When Lead Stories separated audio from the clip and tested it independently with InVid's Hiya tool, it placed the likelihood of the sound being AI generated at 99 percent:
(Image source: InVid.)
Hive Moderation, another AI detection tool, also said the probability of the audio being a product of generative AI was high. According to it, the odds of that were 91.4 percent:
(Image source: Hive Moderation.)
Besides the video, the post shared a link to a website whose name contained the word "Euronews":
(Image source: post by @SprinterPress on X.com.)
As of this writing, the link wasn't working, but Lead Stories found an archived version. That page was unrelated to Euronews: The name of the real organization's website doesn't contain "us" between "euronews" and "com."
According to the Whois domain lookup tool (archived here), this website mimicking the legitimate media organization established in 1993 (archived here) was only 4 days old:
(Image source: Whois.)
The design of the page repeated the features of the real Euronews website, easily misleading audiences.
The use of pages resembling legitimate newsrooms' sites, as well as disseminating fake videos under stolen logos of real journalistic organizations, is known to be a characteristic of at least two Russian-backed campaigns, dubbed "Storm-1516" (archived here) and "Matryoshka" (archived here).
Weeks before the April 2026 parliamentary election in Hungary, media organizations reported (archived here) signs of a Kremlin-backed influence campaign.
