No, Trump didn’t explain viral microphone stand moment with corn dog reference

After a viral moment with his microphone stand at a Nov. 1 rally in Milwaukee, many social media users thought former President Donald Trump was miming a sex act while complaining about his microphone.

Days later, social media users spread what they said was a Truth Social post by Trump countering claims about what he was doing onstage by referring to a corn dog.

A Nov. 3 Threads post shared a screenshot of a Truth Social post that said in Trump’s all-caps style, "I WAS NOT PERFORMING ORAL SEX ON MY MIC, FOLKS. I WAS PRETENDING TO EAT A CORN DOG WHILE WAITING FOR THE TOTALLY INCOMPETENT CREW TO FIX MY MIC. THIS IS PURE ELECTION INTERFERENCE! FAKE NEWS!"

The Threads post caption said, "OK this is not parody. This is really what he's going with." We found other social media posts sharing Trump’s purported explanation.

The Threads post was flagged as part of Meta’s efforts to combat false news and misinformation on its News Feed. (Read more about our partnership with Meta, which owns Facebook, Instagram and Threads.) 

We searched Trump’s Truth Social and X accounts for the corn dog post and found none. That’s because it was, indeed, a parody.

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It was first posted Nov. 2 on X by Agent Self FBI, a self-described parody account. The original post had the word "satire" in small type at the bottom left of the Trump post.

(Screenshot from Threads)

But many social media users sharing the fake Trump post shared an image that cropped out the satire reference, leading some to believe, or wonder, if the Trump explanation was legitimate.

Even the Agent Self FBI post with the satire label had readers questioning it, prompting the account to write, "It’s SATIRE. There’s a satire label clearly visible," in response to one person.

In response to another user speculating whether the Trump post was real, the account responded, "It’s not. I made this, and added a ‘satire’ label that somebody clipped out."

We rate the claim that Trump wrote a Truth Social post saying he had pretended to eat a corn dog False.