Donald Trump promoted the false claim that Barack Obama has earned $40m in “royalties linked to Obamacare” in a post to his 11 million followers on Truth Social on Sunday.
The fictional claim that the former US president receives royalty payments for the use of his name to refer to the Affordable Care Act, which he signed into law in 2010, has been repeatedly debunked since at least 2017, when it was featured on America’s Last Line of Defense, a satirical website that produces fake news reports designed to generate engagement from outraged conservatives.
The updated version of the claim shared by Trump on Sunday fooled many of his supporters in February, when it was posted on Facebook by America’s Last Line of Defense, and on the Dunning-Kruger-Times, a satirical site run by the same man, Christopher Blair, the Maine-based “godfather of fake news”.
On Sunday morning, Trump posted a screenshot of an earlier post with an image of Obama and the text: “BREAKING: DOGE halted a yearly payment of $2.5 million to Barack Obama for ‘royalties linked to Obamacare.’ He’s been collecting it since 2010, for a total of $40 million in taxpayer dollars.”
The president, who spent much of the weekend when he was not golfing deriding Obamacare on social media, as Senate Democrats pushed to extend tax credits for Americans who rely on the Affordable Care Act, shared the screenshot with just one word of comment: “WOW!”
The White House did not immediately reply to a request for comment on whether the president was aware that the report he shared was fictional.
Blair, the owner of the network of satirical website and social media accounts the claim came from, told the Guardian in 2023 that Greg Abbott, the Texas governor, was among the “dumbest people in the country” after Abbott shared a fake article about his own state from the Dunning-Kruger-Times.
