No evidence Donald Trump said that the president should be impeached if Dow Jones drops 1,000 points

A screenshot of a social media post, supposedly from US President Donald Trump’s X account in 2012, saying “the President should be impeached immediately” if the Dow Jones drops 1,000 points in two days is being shared again on social media.

The supposed X post has the date 6 November 2012, and is sometimes shared with a screenshot of what appears to be a Google search result showing the Dow Jones Industrial Average (a stock market index).

We saw these posts shared in early March 2025, after US tariffs on Canada and Mexico took effect and led the Dow Jones to drop by 1,300 points in two days.

But there’s no evidence Mr Trump posted this on X (or Twitter, as it was known in 2012). 

Fact checkers at Snopes debunked this claim in 2018, noting there is no record of Mr Trump having posted such a tweet, and that it was very similar to another supposed tweet by Mr Trump that was revealed to have been a hoax. 

Snopes also reported that the earliest instance they could find of the purported tweet was a screenshot posted in October 2018. 

AFP fact checked the same claim in 2020, and PolitiFact wrote about a similar fake post in 2018. 

An X post from Mr Trump’s account sent at 12:01pm Pacific Standard Time on 6 November 2012—the same time and date mentioned in the viral post—does exist, and may have been altered to display the inauthentic message. The real post did not mention the Dow Jones and instead claimed President Obama was campaigning with Jay-Z and Bruce Springsteen while Hurricane Sandy victims were “still decimated”. 

The quote is an example of a “zombie claim”—one that crops up repeatedly over the course of weeks, months or years, even after being repeatedly debunked.

False or misleading claims online have the potential to harm individuals, groups and democratic processes and institutions. Online claims can spread fast and far, and are difficult to contain and correct.