On July 13, 2024, former U.S. president Donald Trump was shot in the upper part of his right ear at a campaign rally for 2024 presidential elections near Butler, Pennsylvania. Following this failed assassination attempt, an image is being circulated on various social media platforms. The image depicts Donald Trump in a coffin sourced from The Simpsons, a popular show. The claim states that The Simpsons foresaw Trump’s demise.
Factcheck
We investigated this viral claim and found that whenever something goes wrong in the United States, social media users look up to The Simpsons episodes whether they’ve predicted something or not around that. Most of the time, this ‘prediction theory’ turns out to be a hoax.
Our investigation highlighted that this cartoon image of Trump lying in the coffin is fake. No such image appeared in any of the episodes of The Simpsons. To our surprise, we found some media reports by WION and INDEPENDENT dated 27 August 2020. They mentioned that the image is fake and the previous predictions of death on August 27, 2020 were also found to be hoaxes, stating that the date of August 27, chosen randomly, was used by various TikTok users to troll their viewers.
Conclusion
It is clear from DFRAC’s fact-check that the viral image of Trump lying in the coffin is fake. There is no evidence that this image appeared in any of The Simpsons’s episodes. Additionally, media reports have also termed this claim as fake.
Analysis: Fake
