Claim: At the FIFA World Cup 2026, a toddler told Donald Trump that she prefers Pakistan’s former Prime Minister Imran Khan over the US president.
Fact: The video is altered and originally from Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign, not from the 2026 FIFA World Cup. Moreover, the child is not a girl but a boy. In response to the US president’s question about whether he would prefer to stay with him during the event or go back to his parents, the boy said, “Trump.” The viral clip is likely manipulated using artificial intelligence (AI) tools to include Khan’s name.
On 21 July 2026, Facebook user ‘Azher Ali Chandio’ shared a video showing President Trump holding a toddler in his arms before asking if the child would prefer to stay with him or go back to his parents. The toddler responds with “Imran Khan,” referring to Pakistan’s former Prime Minister and founder of the Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI), who has been in jail since August 2023.
The caption accompanying the video reads:
“امریکا کی چھوٹی بچی بھی مُرشد کی فین نکلی۔ فیفا ورلڈ کپ میں ٹرمپ اپنی پہچان بنانے آیا تھا لیکن دنیا آج بھی عمران خان کی دیوانی ہے صرف پاکستان کی عوام نہیں پوری دنیا میں بھی آج عمران خان کے جیسا ئی تھانہ کوئی آئے گا۔✊️🔥
[A little girl from America also turned out to be a fan of Murshid. Trump came to make his mark in the FIFA World Cup, but the world is still crazy about Imran Khan, not just the people of Pakistan. There was no one like Imran Khan in the whole world today and there will be no one like him.✊️🔥]”
Screenshot of the viral video
Fact or Fiction?
Soch Fact Check reverse-searched keyframes from the viral video and found that it matches a moment from Trump’s 2016 campaign rally in Pennsylvania. It is not from when the US president attended the FIFA World Cup final held on 19 July 2026.
During the campaign rally, which was held on 11 October 2016 in the city of Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, the then-presidential nominee “spotted a little boy in the crowd dressed up as him” and called him onto the stage.
As Trump held the two-year-old Hunter Tirpak in his arms, he asked, “Where’s your daddy? And your mommy, right? Do you wanna go back to them [parents] or do you wanna stay with Donald Trump?”
The toddler promptly responded by saying, “Trump.”
The incident — which drew much applause from his supporters — was reported on by multiple news outlets, such as CBS News, CNN, ABC News, The Guardian, and Right Side Broadcasting Network (RSBN).
Nowhere did the toddler say Imran Khan’s name.
AI detectors’ results
To corroborate our findings, we also ran the video through multiple deepfake detection tools.
Hive Detect provided a weak result, stating that the sample is 0.1% likely to be AI-generated video, 0.1% likely to have AI-generated speech, 0.5% likely to be AI-generated music, and 0% likely to be deepfake. However, between the 0:04 and 0:07 mark, the timeline was red because of AI-generated music.
The frame result at 0:05 yielded a 89.9% probability of AI-generated music, with a 96.6% likelihood of the source being minimax, “a global AI foundation model company” that allows anyone to create synthetic lifelike audio using text-to-speech (TTS) and voice cloning in multiple languages.
Results from Hive Detect
According to the NVIDIA Synthetic Video Detector, the clip is authentic, with a synthetic score of 20.2%, which “was lower than threshold (30%), meaning it’s likely a real video”. However, at the 5:09-second timestamp, indicated by the red line in the image below, the synthetic score was 0.248 — or 24.8% — which is closer to the 30% threshold.
Results from NVIDIA Synthetic Video Detector
DeepFake-O-Meter — a tool developed by the University at Buffalo’s Media Forensics Lab (UB MDFL) — said that according to eight of the detectors we used, the likelihood of the video being AI-generated was 100%, 99.9%, 97.8%, 90.3%, 88.9%, 61.7%, 45.2%, and 0.4%.
Results from DeepFake-O-Meter
Moreover, DetectVideo AI provided a stronger result, saying it detected “manipulation indicators” and that “multiple forensic signals are elevated, producing 58% AI/manipulation likelihood”. It confirmed this with “high confidence”.
Results from DetectVideo AI
It is important to note that since the viral video contains a total of 17 words being spoken and the authentic one has 16, the diverse results indicate the challenge of identifying manipulation at a specific point, which has two words (“Imran Khan”) and one word (“Trump”), respectively.
Sound engineer’s analysis
To corroborate our suspicions about AI manipulation, we then sought a comment from Shaur Azher, a lecturer who teaches sound design and sound recording at the University of Karachi and the Shaheed Zulfikar Ali Bhutto Institute of Science and Technology (SZABIST). He also works as an audio engineer at our sister organisation, Soch Videos, and specialises in mixing and mastering audio.
Azher explained that for comparison purposes, Sample A is the claim and Sample B is the original video from 2016.
He said, “Sample B consistently produces the more ‘extreme’ readings — perfect stereo coherence and higher jitter and shimmer — relative to Sample A.”
“Combined with the finding that each sample’s ‘name’ segment (Imran Khan and Trump) carries a different acoustic signature from its own surrounding audio, the two name segments resemble each other more than they resemble their own clips,” he added.
To support his findings, he provided the following observations:
- Mel-Frequency Cepstral Coefficients standard deviation (MFCC SD): Sample A shows an MFCC SD of 26.12, while Sample B is lower at 22.41. Sample A’s tone colour moves around more over the course of the clip than Sample B’s. Higher spectral variability is generally associated with more dynamically articulated natural speech, while lower variability can point to a flatter, more processed vocal quality; however, on its own, without a calibrated baseline, this metric is only weakly diagnostic.
- Stereo coherence and phase alignment: Sample B’s left and right channels move in essentially perfect mathematical lockstep across the entire clip (coherence = 1.000), meaning both channels carry identical content. Sample A shows measurably imperfect coherence (0.846), meaning its two channels are not identical.
- Breath frames and events: Using a spectral-flatness/energy heuristic through an in-house programme, Sample B shows a slightly higher proportion of breath-like frames (4.00%, one consolidated event) than Sample A (2.79%, two shorter events). Both figures are low in absolute terms; these are short 5-7.5 second clips rather than extended continuous speech, so this measurement carries limited statistical weight on its own.
- Jitter: Sample B shows meaningfully higher jitter (2.01%) than Sample A (1.34%), with about 50% more cycle-to-cycle pitch instability. Both values sit within a plausible range for children’s speech; background noise interfering with pitch-period detection in short clips can also inflate this figure independent of the voice source itself.
- Shimmer: Sample B again shows higher shimmer (12.24%) than Sample A (9.54%), indicating greater cycle-to-cycle amplitude instability. As with jitter, this can reflect genuine vocal characteristics or be inflated by background noise/short analysis windows.
Soch Fact Check, therefore, concludes that the viral video is manipulated, likely using AI tools, with the name “Trump” replaced with “Imran Khan.”
Virality
Soch Fact Check found the video shared over two dozen times on Facebook, at least eight times on Instagram, twice on Threads and X (formerly Twitter), and five times on TikTok, where it gained more than 3.74 million views.
Conclusion: The video is altered and the child with Trump is not a girl but a boy. In response to the US president’s question about whether he would prefer to stay with him during the event or go back to his parents, the boy said, “Trump.” He did not mention Imran Khan. Moreover, the original video is from Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign and not from the 2026 World Cup as suggested by the viral post. The viral clip is likely manipulated using AI tools to include Khan’s name.
Background image in cover photo: ImranKhanOfficial
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