In June 2025,
In the video, Trump supposedly said:
Today, I am here to announce that I will be banning the production of all Teslas in the United States of America effective immediately.
As everyone knows, Elon stabbed me in the back a couple days ago and went crazy on his platform X lying about my involvement in the Epstein files, so I can't have this snake Elon making money in this country while I'm the president.
Nobody likes Teslas anyways, unless you're a nerd. They catch fire and break down easily. So it's definitely not the best electric car out there.
And yes, I bought a tesla a few months ago to show my support for Elon, but I have never driven it. That was just so he can back me in the election, and it worked. Now I'm gonna list that s****y Tesla for sale if anyone wants it. I'll let it go for $69, that's the real value of these junk cars.
And more importantly, that snake will now go bankrupt.
[laugh]
He will come back begging to me in a few days again.
The content, however, was not real. It was a deepfake video generated using Artificial Intelligence (AI) tools. The video had a watermark that linked to an Instagram page using the handle "dangerousaireturns," a page full of similar AI-generated deepfake videos.
While the AI tools were able to produce a relatively accurate impression of Trump, they failed to capture the fine nuances of human speech.
Trump's speech in particular is famously unpredictable, in both content and in delivery. He's known for relatively random pauses, inserting little quips and veering off into unrelated tangents, aspects missing in the video.
Additionally, Trump's wording was simply off — the choice of the "$69" sexual reference and the use of a curse word in a public appearance, while perhaps not notable enough to cause a full-on scandal, likely would have made headlines on reputable news sites.
Finally, searching Google for reporting from trustworthy sources of information only turned up unrelated news items related to Trump and Musk.