On June 11, 2025, a screenshot of an alleged Craigslist advertisement seeking "seat fillers" for an event in Washington, D.C., on June 14, 2025 — the same day as a military parade on U.S. President Donald Trump's birthday — began to make the rounds on social media.
The purported ad read, in part:
T-Mellon Events is looking for seat fillers and extras to provide their time for space maximization and attendance perception for an event taking place in Washington DC on June 14th. Extras and Seat fillers will check in on the morning of June 14th at 9:00 a.m.
Extras are required to wear Red, White and Blue clothing and will be provided a RED hat to wear. GOLD accessories are acceptable as well. The team will advise the extras where to stand or sit according to the line of sight from a VIP viewing platform area.
Extras and Seat fillers will be paid a flat daily fee and will be provided a lunch of fast food and soda.
We encourage people of color and ethnic groups to sign up for maximum perception control and these individuals will be prominently displayed on the televised broadcast and local viewing screens to be seen by the VIP platform.
It also listed compensation as a "flat fee of $1,000 paid in cryptocurrency - Provided by FIGHT FIGHT FIGHT LLC."
One X post (archived) that shared the alleged advertisement garnered more than 1 million views and 28,000 likes as of this writing:
Posts about the Craigslist ad seeking seat fillers also gained traction on TikTok (archived) and Facebook (archived). Dozens of Snopes readers emailed us and searched our website to ask if the Craigslist ad was real.
The ad itself was real and was posted on Craigslist (archived) on June 10, 2025. Snopes was unable to definitively confirm whether the ad was a prank or posted by someone from Trump's camp, which is why we've left this claim unrated. However, several elements of the ad suggest it may have been intended as a joke.
First, the company mentioned in the advertisement was listed as T-Mellon Events. Searches for "T-Mellon Events" on Google, Bing, DuckDuckGo and Yahoo did not return any results directing us to the supposed company. Instead, they showed news articles and social media posts about the Craigslist ad.
The alleged company name could be a reference to billionaire and Trump megadonor Timothy Mellon, heir to Pittsburgh's Mellon banking family.
Snopes also looked into the photo in the ad and found it wasn't taken in the United States. Using RevEye, a reverse image search tool, we found the original image shared by The Associated Press on May 9, 2025, captioned, "Russian servicemen attend the Victory Day military parade in Moscow, Russia, Friday, May 9, 2025, during celebrations of the 80th anniversary of the Soviet Union's victory over Nazi Germany during the World War II."
The ad also said participants would receive a flat fee of $1,000 paid in cryptocurrency, which could be poking fun at Trump's crypto-related ventures.
Fight Fight Fight LLC, the company listed in the ad as providing payment to seat fillers, administers Trump's meme coin. A customer support representative for the meme coin's website, gettrumpmemes.com, told Snopes via an emailed statement: "It's fake, we have nothing to do with it."
The person who posted the Craigslist ad later changed the name of the company providing payments to "Fight Fite Fight LLC." There's no record of a real company by that name.
Snopes received an email from someone who claimed to have posted the ad directing us to a post (archived) shared by a Substack user on June 14, 2025. The user wrote that they created the Craigslist ad — which they called a fake — "in response to another viral post" recruiting "paid protesters" for the Los Angeles protests. (Snopes investigated claims that a Craigslist ad proves the 2025 anti-ICE demonstrations in Los Angeles were orchestrated.)
In another post, the same Substack user shared a screen recording of dozens of purported responses to the ad. Snopes asked the person who sent the email for additional confirmation that they created the Craigslist ad and has not received a response.
Snopes reached out to the White House and Craigslist for comment on the ad's authenticity, and will update this story if we receive a response. We also emailed an address associated with the ad and await a response.
Social media posts that call out supposed Craigslist ads soliciting paid actors frequently pop up before events connected to Trump. Snopes investigated a Craigslist ad that offered to pay "minority actors" to hold signs at a Trump rally in Tulsa, Oklahoma, in June 2020, and another soliciting actors to play Trump supporters in Phoenix in November 2019.