Following nationwide protests against U.S. President Donald Trump's administration on April 5, 2025, a screenshot circulated online allegedly showing a Truth Social post by the president claiming billionaire George Soros paid millions of people to participate in the demonstrations.
According to the purported post, the president described the so-called "Hands Off!" demonstrations as "fake" and said the protesters were "actors" paid by Soros.
Social media users shared the post on platforms such as Facebook (
The alleged Truth Social post read:
Wow! The April 5th protests—FAKE! Totally STAGED! I'm hearing from VERY reliable sources (the BEST sources) that George Soros paid FIVE MILLION people—can you believe it??—$100 MILLION EACH to protest. Total Scam. They're not protesters—they're 5 million ACTORS.!
(Multiple Facebook users)
However, there was no evidence of the post on Trump's Truth Social account and the screenshot displayed several signs of being digitally created, such as its inconsistent font and the fact it does not show a time or date. Therefore, we concluded it's fake.
According to The Associated Press, the so-called "Hands Off" demonstrations featured "thousands of protesters in cities dotting the nation from Midtown Manhattan to Anchorage, Alaska" who "assailed Trump and billionaire Elon Musk's actions on government downsizing, the economy, immigration and human rights."
A search for the phrase "George Soros" on Trump's Truth — an archive of Trump's Truth Social posts, including those that have been deleted or removed — produced
The font in the screenshot is not the default font for posts on Truth Social, which can be seen in this authentic Trump post from April 7. Also, real posts on the platform indicate when they were posted.
Additionally, the post's premise is questionable. If Soros paid five million actors $100 million each, as the fake screenshot claims, he would have dished out a total of $500 trillion. For perspective, according to The World Bank, the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) of the United States as a whole was $27.72 trillion as of 2023, and in 2020, Forbes reported Soros' net worth was $8.3 billion.
Not only was the in-question post fake, Trump had not acknowledged the "Hands Off" protests on Truth Social in any capacity as of this writing. Instead, over the weekend of the demonstrations, he made posts promoting his tariff plans, public service announcements about the dangers of fentanyl and his golf swing, among other subjects.
Fact-checking purported Truth Social posts by Trump is not new territory for Snopes. We have previously debunked screenshots supposedly showing the president blaming the Kansas City Chiefs' 2025 Super Bowl loss on DEI, ending dual citizenship and mocking people worried about stock market losses.