Photo: Gage Skidmore from Surprise, AZ, United States of America, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons

This article was first published by Truthmeter.mk (North Macedonia), within the framework of Western Balkans Anti-Disinformation Project.

A Facebook post falsely attributes a statement to Donald Trump Jr., a businessman and the son of the current U.S. president. The claim was investigated by the U.S. news website Mediaite, which determined it to be false. Both Trump Jr.’s spokesman and adviser, Andrew Surabian, as well as Drew Lynch, the producer of the podcast in which the statement was allegedly made, confirmed the inaccuracy

A post on the social network Facebook says the following:

Trump’s son: We should have been delivering weapons to Russia instead of Ukraine

Similar posts can be found elsewhere, so this review will apply to them as well. However, we will focus on the one we started with. The post shares a link to a news article (an archive copy of it can be found here), which says:

“The U.S. should have been sending weapons to Russia,” U.S. President Donald Trump’s son, Donald Trump Jr., said in the podcast Triggered, available on the Spotify platform.

“I honestly can’t imagine anyone in their right mind picking Ukraine as an ally when Russia is the other option,” Trump Jr. said. “I mean just think about it: Massive nuclear power loaded with natural resources everyone needs, literally the biggest country on the planet. And ha ha, there’s Ukraine which has Chernobyl, and some radiation-proof dogs. Meanwhile, the Biden administration is like ‘Oh, yeah, this is definitely the ally we need. Let’s dump all our money into them,’” he added.

“Honestly, if anything, the U.S. should have been sending weapons to Russia.” concluded the son of the American president.

Donald Trump Jr. did not make such statements, and the case was investigated by journalists Isaac Shore and Diana Falzone of the American news website Mediaite, run by Dan Abrams, who has worked for ABC, MSNBC, NBC and other well-known media houses.

Shore checked Spotify, where the Trump Jr. podcast was allegedly posted, but found nothing of the sort at the time. A more recent video of Trump Jr. was found on Rumble, but the statements about Ukraine and Russia were missing.

Mediaite contacted the executive producer of the podcast in which these statements were allegedly made, Drew Lynch, but he denied them, assessing that the Trump Jr. video, which is now circulating across social networks, is fake. These statements were also denied by Trump Jr.’s spokesman and adviser, Andrew Surabian, in a tweet posted on February 26, 2025. The audio recording of Trump Jr.’s speech was most likely computer generated with the help of artificial intelligence.

We can conclude that these statements attributed to Trump Jr. are false, and this is not the first time this has happened. Truthmeter.mk has already written on the topic of such cases.

In order to avoid confusion, we must emphasize that Trump Jr. does have a negative attitude towards Ukraine and has previously made statements against it, especially against its President, Volodymyr Zelensky, therefore many people believed the statements in question were true, however, they are not.

Even if Trump Jr. had made those statements (which he did not), it is important to emphasize that he is simply the son of the President of the United States, not the President himself, nor any official in the political leadership. Therefore, Trump Jr.’s statements are not the official statements of the White House. Trump Jr. is simply a businessman who is to some extent interested in and involved in politics.

Taking all of this into account, we assess the post as untrue.