Several screenshots went viral on Friday appearing to show Donald Trump talking about the controversy surrounding Panera’s lemonade. Trump appears to be discussing the highly caffeinated drink that’s been blamed for the deaths of two people, and even insisting that Joe Biden was somehow responsible. But the images are completely fake. Trump never said it.
The screenshots include captions that make it appear as though Trump was saying, “Everything is bad under Biden. Even the lemonade is killing people. Did you see that? People drink lemonade and die.”
The second screenshot in the series goes on to say, “The lemonade didn’t kill you when I was President. It was tasty and fun to drink. We loved the lemonade, didn’t we?”
The third screenshot continues with, “We did, but not under Biden. Bacon is more money. Gas is more money. The lemonade is more money and it kills you.”
The final screenshot make it look like Trump is saying, “When life hands you lemons, Joe Biden kills you with them.”
The images appear to have been taken from Trump’s recent speech in Coralville, Iowa, but a transcript of that speech reveals Trump never said anything about lemonade. The entire speech is available to watch on YouTube, where you can see Trump never mentions lemonade. The screenshots were simply photoshopped to make it seem like he said that.
Where did these altered screenshots originate? They appear to be the work of Keaton Patti, a comedian who frequently goes viral on X, the platform formerly known as Twitter, with his jokes that make it appear as though an artificial intelligence has created various forms of media. The jokes were so popular that Patti published a book of the fake AI creations in 2020 titled, “I Force an AI to Write This Book.”
Patti did not immediately respond to questions emailed on Friday evening but I’ll update this post if I hear back. But if you saw the screenshots of Trump being spread by other accounts on X or even competitor Bluesky, you’re not alone. Patti’s tweet has 1.3 million views at the time of this writing, but those screenshots are being downloaded and re-shared by other people across a variety of social networks.
One reason the fake screenshots are popular probably has to do with the way Trump’s cadence has been captured. You can almost hear the words in Trump’s voice, even though he never said it. Though, admittedly, the last line about life handing you lemons is slightly to clever for the real Trump, who’s struggled recently with several gaffes.
Oddly enough, Trump recently blamed artificial intelligence for making him look bad, suggesting that many of his verbal flubs were the product of AI software. But Trump really did mess up several claims recently, including a claim that he beat Barack Obama to win the presidency in 2016. Trump actually beat Hillary Clinton. Obama wasn’t eligible to be president again because he’d already served two terms.
X has a program called Community Notes where users can fact-check various claims on the social media service. But one big flaw is that it’s often slow to respond to false information, jokes or not. This tweet, for example, is spreading like wildfire and has yet to get fact-checked by Community Notes, meaning that millions of people will have seen it before it eventually gets some proper context.
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