Claim: Former United States President Donald Trump during a campaign speech said that Afghan women have been wearing veils for years and if he was a woman, he would do it too.
Fact: The video is from Trump’s 2015 election campaign speech in New Hampshire. While he discussed women from the Middle East, he made no specific mention of “Afghan women”.
On 15 August 2024, a Facebook user posted a video with the Urdu language caption that translates into English reads, “Today, Donald Trump won the hearts of Muslims. Addressing an audience, he said that the women of Afghanistan have been wearing veils for thousands of years and this is a good practice, we should not interfere with it”.
The caption implies that Trump made this statement recently during his campaign for the 2024 US Presidential Elections.
Fact or Fiction?
To investigate, Soch Fact Check conducted a reverse search on the video’s keyframes and the results led to a YouTube video, uploaded on 26 October 2015, titled “Donald Trump (2015-10-26) Atkinson, New Hampshire, speech”.
In the video, Trump talked about multiple issues including women’s rights. The same clip as that of the viral video corresponds with the 19:36 mark.
While criticising the then-presidential candidate and Trump’s opponent Hillary Clinton, he adds what they did in Libya caused migration. “We [America] want to give other people freedom but we will not have our freedom soon”. He goes on to say that somebody mentioned that “with the women over there, they don’t have to wear the you-know-what,” Trump said making hand gestures referring to veils worn by some Muslim women.
Trump continues, “And then I said, ‘Oh well that makes sense. That’s nice.’ Then, I saw women interviewed. They said, ‘We want to wear them. We’ve worn them for a thousand years. Why would anyone tell us?’ They want to. What the hell are we getting involved for?”
In the entire video, Trump does not talk specifically about Afghan women or Afghanistan. But he does discuss the United States’ idea of freedom for Muslim women and meddling in the affairs of the Middle East specifically mentioning Iraq and Libya.
CBS News also reported on 26 October 2015 about the speech and Trump’s non-interventionist stance on women’s rights. The article quoted Trump as saying that America should stop meddling in the Middle East because women there “don’t want freedom,” mentioning their desire to veil.
Soch Fact Check, therefore, confirms that the video is not from Trump’s recent election campaign, it is eight years old. The video resurfaced again in the context of the upcoming US Presidential Elections in 2024 and Donald Trump’s ongoing campaign as he runs for office, hoping to be elected for a second term.
Virality
On X, the video received 292.5k views, 3.900 likes and 744 reposts. It was widely shared across countries. The archived versions can be seen here and here.
The video was also shared with an Urdu language caption on Facebook here, here and here.
Conclusion: Donald Trump did not encourage Afghan women to wear the veil in a speech during his ongoing election campaign for the US Presidential Election 2024. The video circulating online is from the former president’s 2015 election campaign.
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Background image in cover photo: BBC
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