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| - Just in case: White House memo claiming Trump banned the term ‘felon’ is not authentic
On Feb.14, an X account posted what appears to be an official White House document signed by U.S. President Donald Trump. The tweet reads, “Trump just banned the word Felon. LOL”.
The memo directed the staff, cabinet members, operational personnel, and visitors to stop using the word “Felon” within White House premises. The document also says violation of this new rule results in expulsion and disciplinary action. It is dated February 14th, 2025, and includes a string of text that appears to be a document number.
The tweet was posted by a politically satirical account named “Rogue WH Snr Advisor” and garnered 7,400 comments, 11,000 retweets and 62,000 likes. While many users reacted with joke memes and other tongue-in-cheek comments, some seem to have taken it seriously.
Similar posts with the same document can be found on Bluesky, Instagram, Facebook, and Weibo, without clear indications that this is a satire.
Trump is the first U.S. president with a convicted felony. He was convicted in 2024 for illegally influencing the 2016 election through a hush money payment to a porn actor, the Associated Press reported.
Since many users appeared to have considered the satirical “White House memo” as authentic, Annie Lab decided to investigate the image.
First, we tried to look for any public record that might resemble such a memo on the White House’s website. A Google keyword search of the word “felon” within the official site during the period starting from Trump’s second term returned no results.
We also found several inconsistencies in the alleged memo — the letter format and Trump’s signature.
Inconsistencies
Annie Lab obtained five letters with the official letterhead during Trump’s first presidency: one to North Korean leader Kim Jong Un in 2018 (archived here), one to members of Congress in 2019 (archived here), one to the Turkish President Erdogan in 2019 (archived here), one to Director-General Tedros of the World Health Organization in 2020 (archived here), and one to America’s Governors in 2020 (archived here).
While the viral “memo” carries a letterhead consistent with the examples, its date format (highlighted in blue) and document numbering, as well as paragraph indentation style (highlighted in red), are all inconsistent with the official letters (see our image comparison below).
Date formatting: Authentic documents issued by the president use Arabic numerals for dates in the letter without adding ordinal indicators “st,” “nd,” “rd,” or “th.” We can confirm that other texts published by the White House follow this practice, as seen in these statements (archived here) and this memorandum (archived here).
On the other hand, the fabricated letter reads, “February 14th, 2025” with “th”.
Indentation: All official White House documents available online do not have a first-line indentation, but the viral image shows a letter with an indented paragraph.
Document number: All the official documents that Annie Lab has collected so far include no document numbers beneath the salutation. But the forged memo includes one.
Trump’s signature: A reverse image search of Trump’s signature on this memo led to an image file on Wikipedia showing the same signature. The file information on Wikipedia led to an article by Quartz in 2017 analysing Trump’s signature.
In the middle bottom of this signature from Quartz, we can see a white spot identical to the signature on the memo (image comparison below).
Each one of the authentic presidential letters we investigated, meanwhile, naturally bore a varying signature in terms of Trump’s penmanship and the pen he used.
We also discovered that publicly available presidential letters are all addressed to external parties, such as foreign leaders, international organizations, and other federal agencies, not for internal White House communication. Annie Lab reached out to the White House for confirmation but has not yet received a response.
Other fact-checkers also looked into the same memo. The White House told Lead Stories on Feb. 14 that they could not confirm the existence of such an announcement. Snopes reported there was no public record of any such document, either.
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