A rumor that the administration of U.S. President Donald Trump canceled a parade scheduled for his birthday when he was unable to produce a birth certificate circulated online in May 2025.
The claim primarily spread across multiple Facebook accounts (archived, archived, archived), garnering thousands of reactions. Dozens of Snopes readers also searched for verification of the claim.
For example, the Facebook account of Andy Borowitz posted the claim (archived) on May 27, 2025:
The post linked to an article (archived) on a website called The Borowitz Report. The story began:
WASHINGTON (The Borowitz Report)—Donald J. Trump's plan to hold a military parade on his birthday imploded on Thursday when he was unable to produce an authentic birth certificate.
Though White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt downplayed the missing document as an "administrative error," the Joint Chiefs of Staff disagreed, stating, "Without a birth certificate, we have no evidence of when or where President Trump was born."
The story also claimed that former President Barack Obama responded to the news, saying, "I knew it!" This is a reference to Trump's longtime stoking of conspiracy theories related to Obama's birthplace before he eventually conceded in 2016 that the former president was born in the U.S.
Some readers seemed to interpret the rumor as a factual recounting of real-life events. However, there was no evidence that anyone had canceled a birthday parade for Trump due to an inability to produce his birth certificate. The top Google search results for the terms "Trump," "birthday parade" and "birth certificate" were examples of the rumor on social media; no credible news site reported the claim.
(Google.com)
The rumor originated with The Borowitz Report, a site that describes its output as satirical in nature. Its author, Andy Borowitz, wrote on its About page:
I've been writing satirical news since I was eighteen. This represents either commitment to a genre or arrested development.
The New Yorker featured The Borowitz Report as a column for 25 years; Borowitz announced in 2023 that the magazine dropped his column for financial reasons.
The fictional story spread as plans gain momentum for a parade celebrating the 250th anniversary of the founding of the U.S. Army, which falls on the same day as Trump's birthday, June 14, 2025.
Snopes has addressed similar stories stemming from The Borowitz Report in the past, including the satirical claim that U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi fired a Department of Justice employee for having a copy of the Constitution on his desk and a rumor that U.S. Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth drunkenly crashed a tank into the Pentagon.
For background, here is why we alert readers to rumors created by sources that call their output humorous or satirical.