Did U.S. President Donald Trump publicly offer his Turkish counterpart, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, to join U.S.-Israeli strikes on Iran to "finish off this Khamenei Jr."? No, that's not true: The screenshot of such a post that circulated on social media was digitally manufactured. Trump's account on Truth Social did not show the entry in question, and there was no credible reporting suggesting that he ever deleted it.
The claim appeared in a post (archived here) on X where it was published on March 9, 2026. It opened:
This left me speechless.... 😶 how about you ?
The post shared an image that looked like a screenshot of a Trump post on Truth Social. It read:
Listen, Mr. Erdogan - tough guy, very tough guy, I like tough guys, not the weak ones, not the losers - you give great speeches, fantastic speeches, everybody says so, beautiful speeches... but what about missiles? Huh? Missiles? Come on, show me the missiles!
Let's do this together, you and me. We finish off this Khamenei Jr. - the son, Little Khamenei, not so great, very weak compared to his father, total lightweight, total loser - we take him out, easy, very easy. Nobody does it better than us. Nobody!
So, Erdogan - talk or action? Speeches or missiles? Make up your mind fast, because I'm ready. Always ready. Tremendous ready. We can make it happen - big league. Let's go!
This is what that image looked like on X at the time of writing:
(Image source: screenshot of post by @Danale from X.)
Mojtaba Khamenei (archived here) became Iran's new ruler on March 9, 2026, after the killing of his father.
The alleged screenshot, however, was not authentic.
Lead Stories searched Trump's account on Truth Social for the keywords from the image seen here (archived here), but that produced no matches.
Trump's account on that social media platform contained only three mentions of the Turkish president (archived here), and they all predated Feb. 28, 2026, the beginning of the current U.S.-Israel military operation against Iran:
A search of an archived record of Trump's social media posts confirmed that he wrote nothing about Erdoğan (archived here) between Feb. 28, 2026, and March 10, 2026, the publication date of this article.
Searches on Google News (archived here) and Yahoo! News (archived here) for the same period yielded no results, either.
Trump did call Erdoğan a "tough guy," but that happened in a very different context. As reported by The Guardian (archived here), the U.S. president said that (archived here) during negotiations of a ceasefire in Gaza in October 2025.
