A screenshot purporting to show a tweet by United States President Donald Trump confusing Argentine football legend Diego Maradona with singer Madonna and tweeting condolences to the latter, is fake.
The fake tweet is being shared after Maradona passed away at the age of 60 from a heart attack on Wednesday, leaving fans across the world in shock and mourning.
Also Read: Diego Maradona, Wild-Haired Magician Dies Aged 60
The viral screenshot of the Trump tweet reads, "Very sad to hear about the death of Maradona. A great person. Her music was wonderful. I remember listening to her albums in the early 1980's. Rest In Peace!"
Click here to view, and here for an archive.
Click here to view, and here for an archive.
Columnist and novelist Shobhaa De also posted the viral screenshot on Instagram, however, did not make any direct claim.
Click here to view, and here for an archive.
BOOM also received the fake screenshot on our WhatsApp helpline number (7700906111) inquiring about it.
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FACT-CHECK
BOOM found that the viral tweet screenshot is fake and United States President Donald Trump did not get confused between Maradona and Madonna. We did not find any such tweet from Trump's Twitter timeline or even a condolence tweet by him on Maradona's death at the time of writing this article.
There were no tweet archives for any such tweet by Trump on archiving sites that archive what the president tweets. (here, here). View Trump's Twitter timeline here.
We found several discrepancies in the viral screenshot that show that it is a fake tweet. The alignment of the profile picture with the tweet body (the text) did not the match the actual format of Twitter. As seen below the profile picture in the viral tweet is extending towards the left and not in a straight line with the text body unlike the screenshot on the right where the picture and text body are in a straight line.
In the viral screenshot after Trump's name, after the @ the handle name has dots, whereas on Twitter after the @ some part of the handle name is seen and then there are dots.
Finally, the fake screenshot shows that the tweet got around 262 thousand replies and 230 thousand retweets, however, there are no other screenshots of this supposed tweet and no coverage of such a goof-up by Trump.
Additionally, if Trump would have tweeted this, it would have been covered by several media outlets and pointed out on Twitter by journalists covering the President, however, we did not find any credible news reports on the same.
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