On September 24, 2025, a supposed news story went viral on the internet, stating that the former Labour Party’s presidential candidate at the 2023 general election, Peter Obi, had recently met with the president of the United States of America (USA) inside the Oval Office.
The picture uploaded alongside the news item showed Peter Obi shaking hands with Donald Trump inside the Oval.
The content was posted 2 days ago on the News Tap website, an online platform in Nigeria.
When we stumbled on this content, we decided to check if any major media outlet in the United States featured this story on its platform,
We found none. Also we did not see the content on the platform of any major Nigerian media outlet.
This led to the picture being checked on the Sightengine website to find out if the image was AI-generated.
This is the result we got.
It says “not likely to be AI generated or deepfake. This someone created further curiosity and this means two things. Humans are increasingly mastering how to use AI or different tools that could beat AI detecting tools or it is just a real image.
So, we probed further to ascertain the veracity of this claim.
In our search, we found that Mr Peter Obi had, on his X page denied the claim that he met with President Donald Trump.
The full length of Peter Obi’s statement can be found on his verified X handle. Peter Obi’s statement shows that the image may not have been AI-generated, but it was doctored.
Many media outlets like Legit.com, Business Day, The Guardian, among others, have published articles on Peter Obi’s rebuttal.
Verdict
The viral news item about Peter Obi meeting with Donald Trump is fake because it never happened, and one of the parties involved has come out to set the record straight, saying that there was never a meeting between the parties.
