A YouTube reel claims to show footage of U.S. President-elect Donald Trump extending an invitation to former president Rodrigo Duterte. This is misleading.
The video was taken in November 2017 during Trump’s first term as president when he made a visit to the Philippines. Back then, the country hosted the 31st Summit of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) as well as the US-ASEAN Commemorative Summit.
Uploaded on Jan. 5, the video played a clip of Trump thanking Duterte. It also bore a superimposed that read:
“Trump invite Duterte. And you are fantastic also very much from the Philippines – Trump.”
As can be seen in the full video from Business World’s YouTube channel, Trump did not extend an invitation to Duterte but expressed appreciation and praise for the Philippines as host of the US-ASEAN summit.
The transcript of Trump’s 2017 speech posted on the U.S. State Department’s website also made no mention of an invitation to Duterte.
Early on, Trump did extend an invitation to Duterte to visit the White House but this did not sit well with a handful of U.S. lawmakers who slammed the latter’s war on illegal drugs for its human rights violations.
Duterte never made a visit to the US, which he described as a “lousy country” and said “there will never be a time that I will go to America during my term, or even thereafter.”
Some netizens in the comments section believed the video was recent and thanked Trump for supposedly inviting Duterte to visit the U.S after his reelection in 2024.
Uploaded by YouTube channel Rowena Rivera, the reel received 910,764 interactions.
This video emerged ahead of Trump’s inauguration as the 47th U.S. president on Jan. 20. VERA Files Fact Check has similarly debunked claims about Trump inviting or visiting Duterte and his daughter Vice President Sara Duterte, after his reelection as U.S. president last November.
