Did Kari Lake tweet that Donald Trump was ‘fat’ in 2016? Not that evidence shows

 

The image was shared alongside a caption that said, "Did you know,...? In 2016, Kari Lake was against Trump,... and called him fat in a tweet."

But we found no evidence that Lake wrote this, although Politiwoops — a ProPublica database of deleted tweets from politicians — is no longer able to operate after  changes that followed Elon Musk’s acquisition of Twitter.

Searches for Kari Lake tweets in the archive website WayBack Machine turned up no results for 2016. Neither did a search in Archive.ph and GhostArchive.

We also searched Lake’s Twitter account for the words in the tweet and found nothing. 

This claim also surfaced in November 2022 and was met with research from a number of skeptical internet sleuths. Multiple Twitter users responded at the time, saying they also searched various internet archives and found no evidence the tweet existed.

Results from a reverse-image search show no record of the tweet being mentioned online before Nov. 4, 2022, making its legitimacy even more unlikely. 

In July 2022, Fox News reported that Lake, who previously worked as a news anchor for KSAZ-TV in Phoenix, had shared an anti-Trump meme on Facebook that said "Not my president" in the days before his January 2017 inauguration. But Lake said in the caption that the meme, which outlined ways to protest the event, was sent to her by a Facebook follower. 

Her campaign also told Fox that this was "very clearly a news-anchor's post; reporting that there was outrage against President Trump's election and asking if people were going to visibly protest his inauguration as the meme suggests. To make anything more out of it is just silly."

The post has since been removed from Lake’s account.

Meanwhile, shortly after Trump was declared the winner in 2016 (the same day of the supposed tweet about Trump’s weight), Lake shared her thoughts on Facebook. She wrote that, "Donald Trump just delivered a very solid victory speech. Sadly, I think many of the people who dislike him, and are upset, did not hear it. I hope it gets replayed tomorrow because I sense he wants to try to bring this country together after a difficult campaign."

We rate claims that Lake tweeted in 2016 an insult about Trump’s weight False.