In May 2025, it was widely discussed on the Internet how the US President did not drink coffee at a meeting with the Saudi Crown Prince and thereby showed extreme disrespect for local traditions. There were reports that a local TV channel, trying to hush up the situation, even aired a video created by a neural network in which Trump finally tried the drink. We have verified the accuracy of this story.
May 14 Telegram channel «Lentach” (143,000 views at the time of writing this analysis) reported: “Al Arabiya TV channel processed video from the meeting between Trump and the Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia using AI. They decided to do this because Trump did not drink the traditional coffee offered to him, as this is a manifestation of gross disrespect for the receiving party. On the occasion of the White House's visit to Saudi Arabia, a welcome ceremony was held at the Royal Palace, during which all participants were offered traditional Arab coffee - gahwa, a spiced drink that symbolizes hospitality in Arab culture. Generated footage of Trump sipping from a cup of offered coffee was broadcast. In fact, Trump put him aside." The post was accompanied by a video comparing real footage taken at a meeting of politicians and a video allegedly created by a neural network and shown on air.
According to the TGStat service, at least 340 similar Russian-language publications appeared on Telegram, which in total received about 4 million views. Among others, the channels “Before everyone else. Well almost"(499,000 views), "Insider UA"(396,000, post deleted), "Dmitry Nicotin"(322,000), "Solovyov"(230,000), "Newsach / Dvach"(211,000), Nexta Live (204,000), "Uncle Slava"(171,000), "Media Russia is not Moscow"(152,000), "Barrel of black caviar"(124,000), Voblya (118,000), "Ostashko! Important" (100,000), as well as "Russian newspaper"(19,000) and Daily Storm (12,000). Channel "Kommersant FM"(60,000 views) talked about the same thing with reference to the quasi-fact-checking project"Ministry of Truth"(50,000). They also wrote about how the Al Arabiya TV channel allegedly processed a video with Trump using AI “Gazeta.ru", "Komsomolskaya Pravda", "Moskovsky Komsomolets", "Military Review", "Paragraph" And Life.ru. On social network X, the following messages went viral in different languages: English (@nexta_tv, 83,000 views), Urdu (@IR_Urdu, 92 000), Indonesian (@SoftWarNews, 60,000), Persian (@nazdikesobh, 21 000), etc.
The viral 24-second video is a collage of two videos playing on top of each other in sequence. At the top is a sign in Farsi asking: “Did Trump drink [Crown Prince Mohammed] bin Salman's coffee?” According to other captions, the first post, highlighted in red, is fake and created by artificial intelligence. Below is the supposedly real original video, highlighted in green. “Although the neural network successfully corrected the video, some errors are still noticeable. For example, in some frames you can notice a difference in the armrests of the chairs, as well as changes in the appearance of the person sitting to the right of the Saudi prince,” explained "Komsomolskaya Pravda".
May 13, 2025 Trump visited Sadov Arabia on an official visit. By statement The largest defense sales agreement in history was signed at the White House in Riyadh, as well as several other deals. In particular, Saudi Arabia pledged invest in AI data centers across the US.
Shortly after Trump's reception with Crown Prince bin Salman, social media users noticed that the US President seemed to refuse to drink the coffee offered to him during the welcome ceremony. Reputable media outlets also wrote about the refusal, including BBC And The Independent. Such publications include a video of Trump accepting a cup and, while others drink, holding it in his hands at knee level, and then placing the drink on the table. In the collage mentioned above, this video is designated as authentic.
“Verified” studied the fragment broadcasts of that technique, available on the Al Arabiya YouTube channel. The meeting between Trump and bin Salman, with portraits of members of the Saudi royal family visible behind them, took place at King Khalid Airport in Riyadh. Al Arabiya video also shows Trump didn't try drink from a taken cup (Saudi News Agency confirmedthat there was coffee in it). Similar broadcasts, in which the US President simply places a cup on the table, were conducted by agencies Reuters And Associated Press, as well as a Saudi TV channel Al Ekhbariya.
However, the welcome ceremony at the airport was not the only one in which Trump and bin Salman took part. According to a Reuters broadcast, a couple of hours later a similar event took place already in Al-Yamamah Palace. There participants (including and Trump*) again distributed cups with coffee. A similar broadcast was conducted Al Arabiya, and also Associated Press And Al Ekhbariya. There was no footage of Trump sipping from a cup.
However, already from these broadcasts it becomes clear: assumptions that the video with Trump drinking coffee was completely or partially generated by a neural network or filmed during his visit to Saudi Arabia in 2017 are erroneous. This video was filmed during the welcome ceremony at the palace in May 2025: the clothes of the politicians and the interior match, and US Secretary of State Marco Rubio is sitting on bin Salman’s left hand (during the ceremony at the airport, he was sitting on Trump’s right hand). However, the video does not contain any artifacts indicating that it was processed by AI.
Moreover, if you examine the slow-motion version of the broadcast frame by frame, you will notice momentas Trump's hand with a cup rises to his face.
The recording also shows Trump gives away cup to a palace employee. “Verified” tried to synchronize this fragment and the viral video.
“Verified” reviewed dozens of reports about Trump’s visit to Saudi Arabia published on YouTube channel Al Arabiya. We couldn't find a story there that showed viral footage of Trump drinking from a cup. However, on the video being distributed comparing the two recordings, the logo of the Persian version of Al Arabiya was in the upper left corner. There's truth in her social networks posted A similar 12-second looped video of the US President drinking coffee in the company of bin Salman. Moreover, in the posts published on May 13 at about 18:00 Moscow time, stated, that earlier this post had already attracted the attention of Internet users.
Indeed, earlier tweets with similar footage can be found on social network X. For example, at 2:04 p.m., a photo of Trump drinking from a cup was published on a page of a Saudi news site news50.sa. The three-second video without any logos was then shared by numerous Arabic-speaking X users (examples here, here, here And here) And news50.sa. At 15:36 the TV channel published a video with its logo Al Ekhbariya.
It was not possible to establish who exactly filmed the video with Trump drinking from a cup. A collage of this video and a recording filmed at the ceremony at the airport first appeared in the Persian-language segment of social networks. Moreover, the creator of this collage used a video with a watermark from the Persian-language service Al Arabiya, which is why the claim subsequently spread that this TV channel was trying to hush up the awkward situation.
Thus, the Al Arabiya TV channel did not broadcast an AI-generated fragment of the broadcast in which Trump drinks coffee. The viral video was shared by both Arabic-speaking Internet users and Middle Eastern media, including the Persian-language editorial office of Al Arabiya. However, despite the claims of some authors, there are no signs of AI processing in the distributed footage. Apparently, users confused two meetings between Trump and bin Salman. Moreover, the US President actually did not drink coffee during the first reception.
How wrote Some media outlets, after that refusal, a conspiracy theory appeared on the Internet: some users suggested that the American president was afraid of poisoning. However, Trump has previously repeatedly stated, who limits himself to drinking coffee after the death of his brother in 1981. “He was ten years older than me and always told me not to drink or smoke. To this day I have not smoked a single cigarette. I didn't drink a glass of alcohol. I won’t even drink a cup of coffee,” told Trump in an interview with Esquire magazine in 2015. At the same time, according to data The New York Times in 2017, the politician could drink a dozen Diet Coke daily. However, on the Internet still lead evidence that Trump occasionally indulges in a cup of coffee. And during a visit to Saudi Arabia in 2017, he more than once drank this drink is prepared according to local traditions.
*Russian authorities think Meta Platforms Inc., which owns the social network Instagram, is an extremist organization; its activities and symbols are prohibited in Russia.
Cover photo: @SaudiNews50 (X)
- Are the footage showing the Olympic Games broadcast on Iranian television true?
- Is it true that the first secretary of the Ukrainian Embassy was wounded in a pager explosion in Lebanon?
- Is it true that Kamala Harris’ team used neural networks to create photos and videos of crowds of supporters?
If you find a spelling or grammatical error, please let us know by highlighting the error text and clicking Ctrl+Enter.
