In wild late-night posting spree, Trump attacks Obama with imaginary quote and false conspiracy theories

By CNN Newsource

Published May 12, 2026 2:23 PM

By Daniel Dale, CNN

(CNN) — President Donald Trump was at it again.

On Monday night, Trump embarked on one of his periodic late-night social media posting sprees. As usual, his dozens of posts and reposts were littered with debunked conspiracy theories and other wildly inaccurate claims – many of them about past presidential elections and his Democratic foes, notably including former President Barack Obama.

Trump’s posting continued on Tuesday morning. So did his wrongness.

Here’s a brief fact-check breakdown of just some of the content to which readers of his Truth Social feed were treated between about 10pm on Monday and about 8am on Tuesday.

An imaginary quote attributed to a Republican senator

The president shared a pro-Trump commentator’s social media post that featured a supposed attack on Obama from Republican Sen. John Kennedy of Louisiana. But the “Kennedy” quote is completely imaginary.

In the fake quote, “Kennedy” demanded that Obama return $120 million that the former president supposedly earned (but actually didn’t) in connection with his Obamacare health care law. The fact-check website Lead Stories reported in February that the fake quote “originated with a satire web publisher who baits conservatives into re-posting fake stories” and that the confusingly worded accusation about Obama that the post put in Kennedy’s mouth – “He allocated money under his own laws using taxpayer-generated prestige” – has also been baselessly attributed to various other public figures, from FBI Director Kash Patel to singers Vince Gill and Madonna.

Kennedy told the publication NOTUS after Trump’s post: “Somebody told me there was something floating around on the internet about me accusing President Obama of stealing $120 million or something. I didn’t say that. I don’t know the basis of it.”

Multiple false conspiracy theories about Obama

False conspiracy theories about Obama have long been a staple of Trump’s reposts on social media. This posting spree featured a bunch more.

Trump shared a post – from an account using the name and image of the late John F. Kennedy Jr. – that said, “Barack Hussein Obama wiretapping Trump Tower during the 2016 election was a million times worse than anything Nixon did during Watergate. It is time to arrest the Renegade.” (“Renegade” is Obama’s Secret Service codename.)

But there is no evidence anybody wiretapped Trump Tower during the 2016 election, let alone that Obama himself did so. In 2017, during the first Trump presidency, the Justice Department said in a court filing that it had no records to support Trump’s claim earlier that year of Trump Tower having been wiretapped in 2016.

During this posting spree, Trump also shared another false conspiracy post that included a link to a web page filled with lies about the Obama administration. These included false claims that former secretary of state Hillary Clinton had used her private email server to sell top-secret information to foreign entities, that Obama had ordered a coverup, and that nine of 13 New York police officers trying to expose the truth “committed suicide or died in suspicious circumstances.” For good measure, the page added a lie that Obama had a “Birth Certificate Scandal” proving he was never eligible to be president.

In addition, Trump shared a video in which Tulsi Gabbard, now his director of national intelligence, baselessly claimed in 2024 that Obama and Clinton, among others, made decisions for former President Joe Biden’s administration. Trump shared another post that baselessly alleged Obama had “commissioned the Intelligence Community to falsify intelligence” and baselessly suggested he is guilty of treason. And Trump shared a video in which a conservative commentator baselessly claimed Obama was a “Trojan horse for the Marxists” and has made a deliberate attempt “to destroy America from within.”

Extensive lying about the 2020 election

No Trump conspiracy blitz would be complete without copious lying about the 2020 presidential election that he lost.

Among other falsehood-filled posts this time, Trump shared one from his former national security adviser Michael Flynn in which Flynn falsely claimed “The 2020 Election was Stolen.” (Trump lost fair and square to Biden.) Trump shared a post that – citing a shoddy news report from right-wing network One America News – falsely claimed Dominion voting technology had “DELETED 2.7 MILLION TRUMP VOTES NATIONWIDE. INCLUDING OVER 1 MILLION PENNSYLVANIA VOTES SWITCHED FROM PRESIDENT TRUMP TO BIDEN.” (None of this happened.) And he shared a post that based its false claim of a “stolen 2020 election” on pro-Trump lawyer Sidney Powell’s false claims about Dominion and other entities.

A baseless assertion that The New York Times is losing subscribers

In a post criticizing a New York Times article about how the cost of his Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool project is more than seven times higher than the “about $1.8 million” figure he cited last week, Trump baselessly claimed that the Times is quickly losing subscribers: “The Failing New York Times, which is one of the worst newspapers anywhere in the World, and is losing subscribers on an hourly basis, is now at it again.”

Trump is entitled to his opinion on the Times’ quality, but it’s a fact that the Times has been steadily gaining subscribers on a net basis, not losing them, though it certainly has some cancelations. The paper reported last week: “The Times has added an average of 330,000 total subscribers a quarter, including print, since the start of last year” and “now has 13.1 million subscribers…after adding about 310,000 digital-only subscribers in the first quarter of the year.”

We don’t have access to hour-by-hour figures, but there’s no available evidence for Trump’s suggestion that the paper is rapidly shedding customers.

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