Claim:
A video authentically shows former U.S. President Barack Obama detailing President Donald Trump’s alleged “cognitive decline” and “physical deterioration,” saying of Trump, “He’s dying.”
Rating:
A video circulated online in November 2025 claiming to show former U.S. President Barack Obama detailing President Donald Trump’s alleged “cognitive decline” and “physical deterioration,” saying of Trump, “He’s dying.”
On Nov. 10, a user managing the Hope In Motion YouTube channel shared the video (archived). The clip’s title read, “‘Most People Don’t Realize How Bad Trump’s Health Really Is’ – Obama,” and claimed to show Obama speaking for about an hour.
The thumbnail image displayed pictures of Obama and Trump with the words, “He’s dying,” as an alleged quote by the former president about Trump. Presented as alleged evidence of the health issues, one image of Trump showed his mouth hanging to one side and another depicted him lying in a hospital bed.
(Hope In Motion/YouTube)
One Snopes reader emailed, “A YouTube video shows Obama saying Trump is dying. I don’t think the video is authentic. Is it?” People also shared the video on Bluesky (archived), Facebook and X (archived).
The video was fake and created with artificial-intelligence (AI) software.
Searches of Bing, DuckDuckGo, Google and Yahoo found no news media outlets reporting on the alleged remarks by Obama about Trump’s health. Had Obama recorded any such statement, outlets worldwide would have reported on the matter.
The video’s creator used deepfake technology. That user altered Obama’s lip movements and vocals in an authentic April 2020 YouTube clip, titled “President Obama joins a call with My Brother’s Keeper Alliance communities & youth,” to create the inauthentic video.
The fake video featured the following introduction, with the inauthentic Obama voice saying (emphasis ours):
I need to tell you something that’s been keeping me up at night, and it’s about Donald Trump’s health. Look, I’ve sat in the Oval Office for eight years. I’ve had the nuclear codes in my pocket. I’ve made life and death decisions at 3:00 a.m., and I can tell you from experience, that job will break you if you’re not physically and mentally fit for it.
I watched my hair turn gray. I felt my body age faster than it should. But my mind stayed sharp because it had to. The presidency demands nothing less. And what I’m watching happen to Donald Trump right now, his cognitive decline, his physical deterioration… it’s not just concerning — it’s terrifying.
His doctors won’t be honest about it. His staff covers for him. The media dances around it. His supporters refuse to see it. But I’m watching a man deteriorate in real time, and nobody’s stopping it.
The slurred speech that’s gettin’ worse. The moments where he forgets where he is. The confusion between people, places, basic facts… the physical instability. The cognitive lapses that are becoming impossible to ignore. This isn’t normal aging, folks. I’ve aged every president in ages.
But what’s happening to him… these are symptoms. Red flags. Warning signs that medical professionals see and recognize immediately. And here’s what scares me most: He’s the sitting president right now with access to nuclear weapons, with the power to declare war. And his health is actively failing before our eyes.
While the fake video’s thumbnail image claimed Obama said of Trump, “He’s dying,” a search of the video’s text captions did not feature that phrase. The clip’s creator featured that quote in the thumbnail image as clickbait.
The thumbnail image’s photo of Trump lying in a hospital bed was also fake. A reverse-image search located no such pictures. The other image of Trump was similar to authentic photos of him at a 9/11 memorial ceremony, as we have previously reported.
We were unable to contact administrators of the Hope In Motion YouTube channel to ask about the video because the channel did not display an email address or other contact information.
For further reading, we previously investigated a video that falsely claimed Trump once told Obama, “Sit down, boy.”
