Claim: Donald Trump showed pictures and videos of Imran Khan to Pakistani voters to procure their votes in the 2024 US election.
Fact: There is no evidence that Donald Trump showed pictures of Imran Khan during his 2024 election campaign.
On 6 November 2024, Geo News posted a video of Pakistani news anchor Hamid Mir saying that Donald Trump had shown pictures of Imran Khan to Pakistani voters in order to obtain their vote. The same clip was shared by social media users across other platforms, including on X (formerly Twitter). In another video posted by Geo News on 5 November 2024, Dr Huma Baqai is seen responding to Hamid Mir, and stating that Donald Trump played a video of Imran Khan to procure votes from the Pakistani-American population.
Fact or Fiction?
Soch Fact Check conducted various searches to find evidence for the claim made by Mir. We searched with keywords such as “Trump rally Imran Khan”, “Trump Pakistani vote Imran Khan”, “Trump Imran Khan election pictures”, and “Trump Khan election”, but no results about Trump showing Khan’s pictures during the elections came up. However, instead of finding credible evidence of Trump using Imran Khan’s pictures during his presidential election campaign, we found three posts making this false claim.
The first is a clip of Trump on X, where he talks about and describes Khan at a rally, and the caption claimed this was the latest speech given by Trump in November 2024. However, Soch Fact Check found a conflicting account of the year this video was shot. Conducting a search for “Trump Houston rally 2023”, we came across the full speech, of which the clip is a small part, that was given the year before on 2 November 2023. The speech can be seen here on YouTube and C-SPAN. While Trump did praise Khan during this speech, the video does not feature Trump showing pictures of Khan to his audience.
The second source of misinformation that turned up in our search results was a clip of Trump vowing to free Khan from jail, which has since been termed doctored by several news outlets like AFP, India Today Fact Check, USA TODAY, and Soch Fact Check. All three outlets noted that the original video is from 2017, in which Trump was interviewed by NBC News. India Today Fact Check observed that Trump’s lips and eyelids are in sync in the original video, while both AFP and USA TODAY pointed out that the movement of his lips was not in sync with his words in the doctored clip.
The third source of false information, also the closest to the claim of Khan’s pictures being shown at a Trump rally, is a video of Trump and Khan posted on X. It was allegedly played at a rally in New York’s Times Square to procure votes from the local Pakistani population. Soch Fact Check also came across a similar claim in a video by Geo News that was posted a day prior to the clip of Mir being posted. In this longer video, Dr Huma Baqai informs Mir that Trump played a video of Khan to gain the support of the Pakistani-American population. Dr Baqai repeated this claim in a video-report by Suno News as well that was captioned “Imran Khan’s video at Trump rally | US Elections 2024”. However, she did not specify the state or city in which this video was played. Soch Fact Check has reached out to Dr Baqai for a statement on this matter and this fact-check will be updated upon receiving a response from her.
However, Soch Fact Check has already debunked the video of Trump and Khan, posted on X, that was allegedly played at Times Square here.
Another fact-check on this video was done by iVerify, “a non-partisan fact-checking initiative of the Centre for Excellence in Journalism (CEJ) at the Institute of Business Administration University in Karachi, Pakistan”, which is “supported by the United Nations Development Programme”. The report by iVerify also concluded that the video of Khan and Trump on a billboard at Times Square is a doctored version of a video originally by Pakistani YouTuber Ducky Bhai.
Apart from these three instances of false information, Soch Fact Check did not find any evidence of Donald Trump showing Imran Khan’s pictures during his election campaign to garner the votes of the Pakistani-American population. It should also be noted that if Trump had shown pictures of Imran Khan at his rallies, it would have been widely reported in the news media.
Soch Fact Check has also reached out to the Trump campaign for a comment on this matter. This article will be updated if and when we receive a response from them.
Virality
The YouTube video posted by Geo News has over 23 K views.
On X, the clip of Hamid Mir claiming Trump showed pictures of Imran Khan has amassed 18.5 K views. It was shared here, here, and here.
The longer YouTube video posted by Geo News (with Dr Huma Baqai stating Trump played a video of Imran Khan) has over 98 K views.
Conclusion: There appears to be no credible evidence that Trump showed pictures of Imran Khan during his 2024 election campaign. Soch Fact Check, hence, rates this claim as false.
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Background image in cover photo: MinuteMirror
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