President Donald Trump did one other social media posting spree on Wednesday night time and Thursday morning. As with Trump’s previous posting blitzes, this one was crammed with wildly inaccurate and sometimes conspiratorial claims about elections and different topics.
Here’s a debunking of two of them.
Trump twice shared a video titled “California Governor PANICS as Walmart Shuts Down 250+ Stores Across State.” The video, echoed by the textual content in one of many posts Trump shared, claimed that Walmart is getting ready to close down these stores as a result of the retailer can’t afford California’s “$22” per hour minimal wage.
But California’s statewide minimum wage is $16.90 per hour, not $22 – and Walmart instructed NCS on Thursday morning that it isn’t conducting a large retailer closure in California for any cause.
“This isn’t accurate information,” a Walmart spokesperson stated. “In fact, we actually just recently opened a new store in California.”
California Gov. Gavin Newsom’s workplace posted on social media on Wednesday night time expressing disbelief that Trump had promoted each the false claim about Walmart – “Walmart’s 303 stores in California are open,” Newsom’s workplace wrote – and a fair wilder however equally faux anti-Newsom conspiracy principle the president additionally shared throughout the social media blitz.
Newsom’s workplace wrote: “We cannot believe we have to say any of this out loud. We cannot believe this is real life. And we truly cannot believe this man has the nuclear codes.”
The phony claim about Walmart shutting a whole bunch of California stores was beforehand posted on a YouTube account that seems to have been dedicated to sensational however inaccurate movies attacking Newsom.
On Thursday, Newsom’s workplace offered NCS with a screenshot from the YouTube account, which an aide stated was taken Wednesday night time, that confirmed the account had posted quite a few extremely comparable latest movies making sensational false claims about life in California below Newsom.
By Thursday morning, nearly the entire anti-Newsom movies had been deleted from the account.
Multiple posts from Trump on Wednesday night time and Thursday morning made false claims about elections, together with conspiracy theories in regards to the 2020 election the president wrongly insists was stolen from him. One significantly preposterous post Trump shared outlined a (nonexistent) vote-flipping conspiracy involving former President Barack Obama, the FBI, the CIA, China and Italian officers.
Other posts made claims that have been extra easy, however no much less false. For instance, Trump twice shared posts claiming that Wisconsin has greater than seven million registered voters, hundreds of thousands larger than its whole variety of adults; one of many posts stated, “This is not a glitch; it is election fraud waiting to happen!”
But Wisconsin doesn’t have anyplace near seven million registered voters. The web site of the Wisconsin Elections Commission says, “The State of Wisconsin had 3,602,958 active registered voters on January 1, 2026.”
The fee instructed NCS on Thursday that the state additionally has about 4.6 million inactive voters – individuals who died; moved away and registered in one other state; have been convicted of a felony; have been adjudicated incompetent to vote; or have been purged from the voter rolls as a consequence of inactivity – however that “inactive voters are not considered registered voters” and “would have to re-register before voting.”