The Nation’s Capital Has a New (Fake) Name
PLUS: News Report Showing Protester Spitting on Vance’s Daughter Is a Pro-Kremlin Fabrication; Distortion of CDC Data Downplays Measles
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Today:
An AI audio of Trump renaming D.C. ‘District of America’ fools both left and right
Bogus Al Jazeera video claims pro-Ukrainian protester spit on Vance’s young daughter
Health misinformation sources distort CDC data to downplay measles outbreak
And More …
Today’s newsletter was edited by Eric Effron and Sofia Rubinson.
1. Widely Shared Audio of Trump Changing the Name of ‘District of Columbia’ to ‘District of America’ Is a Deepfake
By Hilary Hersh
What happened: Both liberal and conservative social media accounts are spreading a supposed audio recording of President Donald Trump privately stating that he is changing the name of the nation’s capital from the “District of Columbia” to the “District of America.”
A closer look: In the audio clip, a voice that sounds like Trump’s states: “No more Washington, D.C. I hate it. It makes no sense. They call it the District of Columbia. It’s got nothing to do with Colombia. It’s nowhere near Colombia. From now on, it will be Washington, D.A., District of America. No more of this Colombian nonsense.”
You can listen to the audio here:
The claim that Trump said this spread widely on social media, including TikTok, Facebook, Bluesky, and X, mostly among liberal users who criticized the purported name change, although some conservative users also shared and praised the supposed move.
On March 13, anti-Trump X user @MAGACult2 posted the audio and said: “He is truly the dumbest MFer alive. He wants to change the name from DC to DA.” The post garnered 1 million views and 15,000 likes in five days.
Anti-Trump TikTok user @irishjerseygirl08 posted a video of herself listening to the audio with the caption, “How is this real life…?” The video accrued 167,000 views and 13,000 likes in four days.
TikTok user Kate Monroe, a Trump supporter, discussed the supposed name change in a March 17 video and stated in the caption, “There’s always a plan. The renaming of Gulf of Mexico to Gulf of America lets us drill. What’s the amazing thing we can do now now [sic] with Washington DA rebrand?” The post garnered 373,000 views and 42,000 likes in one day.
Actually: The clip is AI-generated, according to digital forensics experts.
University of Michigan-Dearborn computer engineering professor Hafiz Malik told NewsGuard in a March 2025 email, “It is definitely an AI-generated (deepfake) audio of President Donald Trump,” a finding he said was based on “our Speaker-Specific Model (for Donald Trump), our generic deepfake detection tool, and forensics analysis.”
NewsGuard found that the now-deleted TikTok account that first published the audio, @whmole (apparently short for “White House mole”), apparently has created fake audio clips of Trump on other topics, including clips that sound like Trump advocating for the elimination of daylight saving time and the renaming of St. Patrick’s Day to St. Donald’s Day.
Where D.A. may have originated: Before the fake Trump audio was published, the name “District of America” was mentioned in a Feb. 18 X post by stand-up comedian Greg Fitzsimmons, who has previously been critical of the second Trump administration.
With apparent sarcasm, Fitzsimmons said: “Trump truly has changed Washington. It is no longer called the District of Columbia. From now on it is the District of America.”
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2. No, Al Jazeera Did Not Report that a Pro-Ukrainian Protester Spit on JD Vance’s Young Daughter
By Macrina Wang
What happened: Pro-Kremlin sources are sharing a doctored video appearing to be from Qatari state-funded news agency Al Jazeera reporting that a pro-Ukrainian protester spit into a stroller carrying U.S. Vice President JD Vance’s 3-year-old daughter.
Context: On March 8, 2025, Vance was confronted by a group of pro-Ukrainian protesters in Cincinnati, Ohio, as he was walking with his daughter in a stroller. Following the incident, Vance criticized the demonstrators in an X post, saying that they followed him and his daughter around and “shouted as my daughter grew increasingly anxious and scared.”
A closer look: The fake video claimed an Al Jazeera employee named “Musa Ali Daoud” used thermography — which is employed to create images and videos showing the temperatures of objects — and “found that one of the activists had discreetly spit from behind JD Vance’s back right into the baby stroller.”
The supposed thermography included in the video, showing the activists in grayscale with blacks and whites inverted, seems to depict a thin streak moving toward Vance’s daughter that is described as spit from an activist.
You can watch the video here:
Actually: The video is digitally manipulated, and there’s no evidence that Al Jazeera issued such a report or that a protester spit on Vance’s daughter.
Neither Vance nor any credible news outlets that reported on the confrontation mentioned anyone spitting at the stroller.
NewsGuard did not find any record of the video on Al Jazeera’s official channels or any record of an Al Jazeera employee named “Musa Ali Daoud.” (NewsGuard sent an email to Al Jazeera seeking comment but did not receive a response.)
The original footage was manipulated to add the supposed spit in the video. The fluid can be seen moving at a higher frame rate than the rest of the video, which could not happen in authentic video footage.
Who’s behind it? The video matches the tactics of Matryoshka, a Russian influence operation that publishes anti-Ukraine content and pro-Kremlin disinformation videos mimicking credible Western media outlets including E! News, the BBC, and CNN, as previously reported in Reality Check.
The video appears to have originated on March 11, 2025, in a Telegram post by pro-Kremlin user @kotreal.
The post said in Russian: “One of the Ukrainian protesters who surrounded Vance last weekend spat in Vance’s daughter’s stroller. This was discovered by an Al Jazeera journalist when he was studying the video of the incident frame by frame. Pigs are pigs… How I understand Russians now! - Vance must have thought.”
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3. Bad Measles Math: Cherry-Picked CDC Charts Used to Minimize U.S. Outbreak
By John Gregory
What happened: Accounts with large followings on X, Facebook, and YouTube are misrepresenting federal data to portray the ongoing measles outbreak in the U.S. as nothing out of the ordinary.
A closer look: Some commentators shared a chart (below) based on yearly measles case data reported by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), showing that 2025 measles cases did not surpass totals reported in 2024, 2019, 2018, or 2014.
Dr. Mary Talley Bowden, a Houston-based ear, nose, and throat specialist who has frequently advanced false claims about COVID-19 vaccines, posted the chart on March 9, 2025, and stated, “Outbreak? Or political propaganda.” The post generated 395,000 views and 13,000 likes in eight days.
Comedian and podcast host Jimmy Dore said in a March 12, 2025, YouTube video that attracted 101,000 views that there was “hysteria right now that’s being manufactured by the media” about measles, pointing to the chart to back his argument: “So just over a thousand [measles cases] in 2019 … and here we are right now, 222. So what are they talking about?”
The same chart was shared on X by the official account of the COVID-19 conspiracy documentary “Died Suddenly,” which has 818,000 followers, and to the 164,000 Facebook followers of Kevin Steele, a former news anchor for Beaumont, Texas, ABC affiliate KMBT.
Actually: The chart has a major flaw — it is comparing 12 months’ worth of measles cases in other years to less than three months of 2025 data.
Indeed, the most recent CDC update said that as of March 13, 2025, 301 measles cases have been reported in 14 states — already more than what was reported in all of 2024.
Since measles was declared eliminated in the U.S. in 2000, no other year has recorded this many cases this early in the year, according to a NewsGuard review of CDC data archived from the agency’s website. An unvaccinated child died in Texas in the first U.S. measles death in 10 years, officials said. (The spike in measles cases in 2019 was largely driven by an outbreak among Orthodox Jewish communities in New York.)
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