The video does not show Donald Trump floating the Biden body double conspiracy theory

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A recent Instagram post casts doubt on long-standing conspiracy theories that President Joe Biden was replaced by an impostor.

The June 1 post featured two photos of Biden with his earlobes rounded. Changes in his earlobes over the years are often cited as evidence that the man who is now said to be Biden is not the same man who once served in the US Senate.

Above these images is a video montage of comments made by former President Donald Trump.

“You know it and I know it,” Trump said in the first clip. “Joe doesn’t know he’s alive.”

Trump’s comments continued: “Because Biden doesn’t know he’s alive.”

“Biden doesn’t know, I mean he doesn’t know he’s alive.”

“Now I have to tell you, he’s a different guy. He looks different than he used to, he acts different than he used to, he’s even slower than he used to be so I don’t know. But I call him 1% Joe. Joe Biden is a dummy.”

“Its not him. Hes a puppet.”

This post has been flagged as part of Metas’ efforts to combat fake news and misinformation in its News Feed. (Read more about our partnership with Meta, which owns Facebook and Instagram.)

But Trump is not suggesting that Biden has been replaced by an impostor, as the post suggests.

Instead, he commented on Bidens mental health and thought he was unfit to serve as commander in chief.

The first clip, for example, comes from a Fox News interview in September 2020 in which Trump said: “You know it and I know it. Joe doesn’t know he’s alive. If you ask him that question when without a teleprompter, I don’t think he could have answered the question.”

That echoed remarks he made in a Fox News interview in July 2020: “I’m saying he’s not fit to be president. To be president, you have to be sharp and tough and a lot of other things. He’s not even came out of his basement that Joe didn’t know he was alive, OK? He didn’t know he was alive.”

Trump even posted a clip from that interview on YouTube with the title: “President Donald Trump says Joe Biden is unfit to be president.”

Trump’s quote about Biden as a “different person” stems from remarks he made in June 2019, when he called Biden “mentally weak.”

We rate the claim that this video shows Trump saying Biden was replaced by a literal impostor False.

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