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| - These still images were taken out of context from speeches in which each politician was making an unrelated gesture, including waving or raising their hand to make a point. Their language, demeanor and the wider context of the video shows the gestures cannot be interpreted as Nazi salutes.
As U.S. President Donald Trump took office in 2025, his inauguration celebrations were marked by controversy over a gesture made by his supporter Elon Musk that many people claimed was a Nazi salute. On Jan. 20, 2025, viral videos showed the tech billionaire speaking at a rally and doing a gesture that began with his right hand over his heart and ending with his arm fully extended in front of him, palm down.
A number of social media posts claimed Musk was not the only prominent individual who has made such a gesture. Images on X and Reddit, and in memes sent to us by readers appeared to show prominent Democrats including former President Barack Obama, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, Sen. Elizabeth Warren, and former Vice President Kamala Harris making the same gesture.
(Screenshot via Reddit)
One post on X (archived) implied the news media was biased against Musk: "I'm sure the media is completely outraged by this, right? Right???"
(X user @libsoftiktok)
However, the images being shared present each politician in a misleading manner — they were waving their hands and speaking on different issues that had nothing to do with Nazism, and each photo or screenshot happened to capture one small moment in time. Musk made the gesture more than once and with deliberation. Given that we do not know Musk's intentions in making the gesture, and that the screenshots of Democrats were taken out of context, we rate this claim as false.
Below, we break down all the different photos of the Democratic politicians and the claims against them. We have reached out for comment from Clinton, Harris, Obama and Warren and will update this story if we receive more information.
Hillary Clinton
An Associated Press photographer took one of the photos being shared of Clinton at a fundraising event in Chicago on Dec. 18, 2007.
(Screenshot via Associated Press)
We were unable to find footage from that event, but we obtained footage of Clinton speaking at a town-hall meeting on Dec. 29, 2007, from C-SPAN. At the 23:52 minute mark, we noticed that Clinton tended to raise her arm with her palm facing downward when making a point, and she would wave her arm around to emphasize the point.
Numerous photographs of Clinton over the years show her making similar gestures, indicating this is one of many mannerisms she adopts when making speeches. Even the photograph of Clinton in a yellow suit with her hand raised high, shared in some versions of the claim, is similar to all the photographs in which she is simply waving or acknowledging a crowd. Clinton has condemned white supremacists, including in an opinion piece she wrote for The Washington Post.
We found no reporting from that time indicating that Clinton was deliberately doing a Nazi-style salute. Had that been the case, it would have made headline news. The above post takes a moment from one of Clinton's speeches out of context and misrepresents it.
Kamala Harris
The image of Harris is from the 2019 South Carolina Democratic Party convention, where she appeared as a presidential candidate. The screenshot took place at the 5:24 mark in this C-SPAN video, where Harris said: "So I stand before you as a candidate for the president of the United States, prepared to do the work of helping our nation see what can be, unburdened by what has been, and see the vision of the future respecting our past."
Right after making that gesture she criticized Trump repeatedly, while lifting her right arm and pointing upward. Harris continued:
[Trump] says he wants to "make America great again." Well, what does that mean? Does that mean he wants to take us back to before schools were integrated? Does that mean he wants to take us back before the Voting Rights Act was enacted? Does that mean he wants to take us back before the Civil Rights Act was enacted?
Harris was clearly criticizing Trump's record on supporting Black communities, and discussing her own history as a prosecutor and her parents' civil rights activism. The content of her speech was in fact completely opposed to the false claim that she was making a Nazi salute.
Barack Obama
The photograph of Obama is taken from 2010, when the then-president was speaking at the Republican House Issues Conference in Baltimore.
(Saul Loeb/AFP/Getty Images)
In footage of the speech, Obama repeatedly raised his right arm out while discussing a range of issues. At the 25:00 mark he raised his arm as he spoke about healthcare. At the 41:31 mark, he discussed promoting more renewable energy, while raising his arm up more than once:
Because if we're not leading, those other countries are going to be leading. So what I want to do is work with West Virginia to figure out how we can seize that future. But to do that, that means there's going to have to be some transition. We can't operate the coal industry in the United States as if we're still in the 1920s or the 1930s or the 1950s. We've got to be thinking, "What does that industry look like in the next hundred years?" And it's going to be different. And that means there's going to be some transition.
His remarks had nothing to do with Nazism, and the above photograph is miscaptioned by social media posts.
Elizabeth Warren
The screenshot of Warren was taken from the 2016 Democratic National Convention, where she spoke in support of then-presidential candidate Hillary Clinton. At the very end of her speech, around the 19:30 mark, Warren raised her left arm and said "Thank you!" followed by her right arm:
That moment was captured in a screenshot and placed out of context. At no point in her speech did Warren say anything in support of white supremacy or Nazism.
Snopes has previously covered Musk's controversial gesture. We concluded that there was too little evidence to draw a firm conclusion about his intentions even as the neo-Nazi and far-right community praised the gesture. In the days following the gesture, Musk made a series of puns (archived) about Nazi-related terms and wrote (archived) a post critical of the "legacy media" for trying to "cancel" him "for saying 'my heart goes out to you' and moving my hand from my heart to the audience."
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