Does a video show former U.S. President Donald Trump speaking in Kurdish? No, that's not true: The brief clip appears to have been digitally altered and it is visible that Mr Trump's lip movement do not match the audio.
The claim originated from a TikTok video posted on April 8, 2023 and it showed a digitally altered video of an appearance by the former President in 2016 on The Tonight Show with Jimmy Fallon with a digitally inserted Kurdish flag in the foreground and with a Kurdish language dubbed audio track.
This is what the post looked like on TikTok at the time of writing:
(Source: TikTok screenshot taken on Wed Apr 19 09:26:00 2023 UTC)
The original version of the video showed the ex-president appearing on The Tonight Show with American television host Jimmy Fallon from January 12, 2016 entitled "Mock Job Interview For President with Donald Trump."
The digitally altered version in this post was translated by Lead Stories.
Fallon asked:
People are saying you are originally from Afrin, is that true?
Trump replied:
Yes. That is true. I am from Afrin, and more specifically from Momolo village.
A caption appears in the video clip reading:
"Congratulations to the people of Afrin. It turned out that Trump is Afrini," a reference to a predominantly Kurdish region in northern Syria, which Turkey occupied in 2018.
Trump's biography posted on the White House's website states that the former president was born in Queens in New York City in 1946.
The original video, posted on YouTube on Jan.12, 2016, showed then-Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump answering a list of job interview questions, while Fallon evaluated his qualifications.
Here's the original 2:34-minute video:
