The Deepfakes Analysis Unit (DAU) analysed a video that apparently shows United States President Donald Trump alleging that the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), a Hindu volunteer organisation in India is influencing the faith of indigenous communities of Arunachal Pradesh state through monetary inducements. After putting the video through A.I. detection tools and getting experts to weigh in, we were able to conclude that synthetic audio was used to fabricate the video.
A Facebook link to the three-minute-and-20-second video in English was sent to the DAU tipline for assessment. The video features an inset with Mr.Trump speaking to the camera along with a set of unrelated visuals that play out simultaneously. Almost half of those visuals are from RSS chief Mohan Bhagwat’s recent visit to the prayer center of the Nyishi community, the largest ethnic group in Arunachal Pradesh. The other set of visuals show saffron-clad men performing religious rituals.
The visuals of Trump show him in a close-up with a portion of the American national flag visible in the backdrop. It appears that a short clip of his has been looped together to create the longer video as the same facial expressions keep repeating after short intervals.
A male voice recorded over Trump’s visuals accuses RSS of giving money to followers of the Donyi Polo faith, an indigenous animist religious tradition, to go against their “Christian Tani brothers using the APFRA act (sic)”. The same voice claims that this is “about politics using religion” and urges the “true followers” of the Donyi Polo faith to “kick these toxic influences out of the state.”
The audio track mentions the indigenous Tani tribes from Arunachal Pradesh with regard to the Arunachal Pradesh Freedom of Religion Act (APFRA), a law that seeks to prevent forceful religious conversions. Following last year’s order from the Gauhati High Court the state government is bound to frame rules for the implementation of the decades-old law.
The voice being attributed to Trump bears similarity to his natural voice. The accent and nasal quality in that voice also sound somewhat similar when compared with his recorded speeches and interviews. However, the overall delivery sounds scripted and robotic; it lacks the changes in pitch and the pauses that are characteristic of his style of delivery. A peculiar feature in the audio track is that the voice slows down to lay emphasis at each mention of “RSS” in the audio track.
The overall quality of Trump’s visuals is poor. Many inconsistencies are visible around Trump's mouth region. His lips appear to be moving unnaturally fast and seem out of sync with the accompanying audio. His teeth appear blurry; the upper set of teeth are visible in some frames and are missing in several others.
The top-right corner of the video frame bears a logo that carries the words “K K News”, and the symbol of a mic emblazoned upon a map with “Kurung Kumey News” written below. The second-half of the video carries two additional logos. One of those resembles that of Arunachal News Live (ANL), a YouTube channel that carries content from Arunachal Pradesh. Only a part of the other logo is visible; it comprises a yellow-coloured semi-circle with a map and “Arunachal” written in bold.
The first half of the video carries text graphics at the bottom of the frame related to Bhagwat’s visit to the prayer center in Arunachal Pradesh. In the second half, the text graphics mention that people from India’s northeast participated in the Maha Kumbh, a Hindu religious congregation which recently concluded in Uttar Pradesh state. The last set of text graphics seem like advertisements.
We undertook a reverse image search using screenshots of the video and established that the clips of Trump, Bhagwat were used with unrelated visuals of saffron-clad men participating in religious rituals.
Trump’s clip was traced to this video published on May 12, 2017 from the official YouTube channel of NBC News, an American television news broadcaster. The clothes, body language, and backdrop of Trump in the manipulated video and this video are the same. The “NBC News Exclusive” logo seen in the original video is not part of the doctored video.
In March 2024, the DAU debunked a similar manipulated video apparently featuring Trump. Footage from the same original video was used with synthetic audio to peddle a fake narrative about Trump promising Pakistani Americans the release of former Prime Minister Imran Khan from prison.
We traced Bhagwat’s clips to several social media accounts such as this one. Still images from his visit to Arunachal Pradesh can also be seen in this video published on March 2, 2025 from the official YouTube channel of Northeast Live, which carries news content about the northeastern states of India. The clips of Bhagwat with the captions in the doctored video match exactly with the clips on social media.
Some of the visuals of the saffron-clad men were traced to the Facebook page of Arunachal News Live; posted on March 17, 2025. These pertained to the Maha Kumbh visit of Taba Tedir, former education minister of Arunachal Pradesh. A few other clips seem to have been lifted from a Hindu religious leader’s Instagram handle, uploaded on Feb. 20, 2025.
The logo of “K K News” seen in the manipulated video was not found in any of the original videos.
To discern the extent of A.I. manipulation in the video under review, we put it through A.I. detection tools.
The voice tool of Hiya, a company that specialises in artificial intelligence solutions for voice safety, indicated that there is a 79 percent probability of the audio track in the video having been generated or modified using A.I.
Hive AI’s deepfake video detection tool pointed out markers in several frames featuring Trump, indicating A.I. manipulation in his video track. Their audio detection tool found no manipulation in most of the audio track but for one 10-second segment, which it designated as “A.I.-generated”.
We also ran the video through Deepfake-O-Meter, an open platform developed by Media Forensics Lab (MDFL) at UB for deepfake image, video, and audio detection. The tool gives an option of various classifiers through which a media file, in this case the video, can be run for analysis.
We chose six audio detectors, out of which five gave strong indicators of A.I. in the audio. AASIST (2021) and RawNet2 (2021) focus on detecting audio impersonations, voice clones, replay attacks, and other types of audio spoofs. Linear Frequency Cepstral Coefficient (LFCC) - Light Convolutional Neural Network (LCNN) model classifies genuine versus synthetic speech to detect audio deepfakes.
RawNet3 (2023) allows for nuanced detection of synthetic audio and RawNet2-Vocoder (2023) is useful in identifying synthesised speech. Whisper (2023) is designed to analyse synthetic human voices.
For a further analysis on the audio track we also put it through the A.I. speech classifier of ElevenLabs, a company specialising in voice A.I. research and deployment. The tool returned results indicating that it was “very unlikely” that the audio track used in the video was generated using their platform.
For expert analysis, we shared the video with our detection partner ConTrailsAI, a Bangalore-based startup with its own A.I. tools for detection of audio and video spoofs.
The team ran the video through audio as well as video detection models, the results that returned indicated high confidence for A.I. manipulation in the video and audio track.
In their report, they added that lip movements of Trump look unnatural and animated compared to the rest of the face. They also noted that despite the voice sounding like Trump, the monotonous delivery and the pacing sounds unnatural.
On the basis of our findings and expert analysis we can conclude that authentic visuals of Trump and Bhagwat were used with synthetic audio to fabricate a narrative about the RSS bribing indigenous communities from Arunachal Pradesh to engineer a conflict.
(Written by Debraj Sarkar, edited by Pamposh Raina.)
Kindly Note: The manipulated video/audio files that we receive on our tipline are not embedded in our assessment reports because we do not intend to contribute to their virality.
You can read below the fact-checks related to this piece published by our partners:
Deepfake: Video Of Trump Accusing RSS Of Inciting Riots In Arunachal Pradesh
Video of Donald Trump speaking about RSS and Arunachal Pradesh is a deepfake
