President Donald Trump handed his Truth Social followers a deceptively edited video of King Charles III on September 7, 2026, using part of the U.S. Labor Day holiday to push out a montage assembled to make the British monarch look unmoved by a worker who collapsed in front of him.
The cut the 80-year-old president posted runs like this: a man faints beside Charles, who appears to shrug and throw his hands in the air, then walks off without helping as the clip moves on. Nearly the opposite happens in the unedited footage.
The whole montage runs on contrast. Other world leaders appear to behave badly. Then scene after scene of Trump with police officers, veterans and the families of fallen service members follows in the cut. The president dropped it into a burst of holiday posting on Truth Social, his own platform.
What the Unedited Footage Shows
The scene took place on July 9, 2020, at an Asda supermarket distribution center in Bristol, England, a site that had played a key role in the supply chain as the COVID-19 pandemic broke out. Charles, then the Prince of Wales, had come to thank staff who had kept the country’s food supplies moving. His wife, Camilla — then the Duchess of Cornwall, now the queen — was with him.
A worker in mid-conversation with Charles began swaying on his feet, then went over backward. Charles, who was 71, reached out to try to stop the man from falling and stayed close by afterward, visibly concerned, as the worker received medical attention. “Dear, oh dear,” he said as the man went down. Asda said afterward that the worker “briefly fainted, but after taking a few minutes to recover himself he returned to continue his tour and reassure everyone he was absolutely fine,” and the same footage shows him meeting Charles again minutes later. The cut Trump shared keeps none of it, leaving the king seemingly walking away.
Charles is not the first target. French President Emmanuel Macron, 48, opens the three-minute video at the Élysée Palace on June 9, 2023, welcoming Madagascar’s president as a Republican Guard member collapses behind him in the Paris heat. Macron appears not to notice and walks past.
A Reel of World Leaders
Former President Joe Biden, 83, comes next, glancing down at his wrist at the August 29, 2021, dignified transfer at Dover for the 13 service members killed in the Kabul airport attack. The common rebuttal does not hold. USA Today corrected its own fact-check to say he checked his watch “multiple times at the dignified transfer event, including during the ceremony itself,” rather than only after the caskets had been carried from the tarmac. An Associated Press photographer, meanwhile, captured two watch-checks 10 minutes apart. Snopes did find one claim unsupported — that he looked 13 times, once for each casket. Then comes former President Barack Obama, stepping off the Marine One helicopter in New York on September 23, 2014, and saluting two U.S. Marines while holding a takeout paper coffee cup in the same hand — the so-called “Latte Salute.” Conservative commentators aimed loud outrage at that gesture at the time.
The Trump Half of the Montage
That contrast carries the doctored video entirely: figures who seem unbothered, followed by a president who seems engaged. Trump greets police officers with handshakes, embraces military veterans and holds out a chair for Melania Trump. In other clips, he picks up a U.S. Marine’s fallen cap, salutes at a repatriation ceremony and comforts relatives of service members who had died.
Text stamped over the clips told viewers they were seeing “the side of Trump the media doesn’t show you” and billed him as “the people’s president.” Christina Perri’s “A Thousand Years” runs as the soundtrack from start to finish.
The Charles segment carries the video’s starkest deletion. The editors dropped the stretch in which the king remains beside the stricken worker, so the clip finishes on what looks like a shrug and an exit.
All of it sits oddly against the friendliness Trump has typically extended to the monarch. He hosted Charles and Camilla for a state visit from April 27 to 30 and has often talked up their rapport. At the White House farewell on April 30 he offered his warmest verdict yet, when he called Charles “He’s a great king. The greatest king in my book.” He praised the king again in the days before posting the video, calling him amazing and a “fantastic guy.” Buckingham Palace declined to comment on the montage.
No one has reported who assembled the montage, and whether the president watched the full footage before sharing it is not known. The record the clip distorts is extensively documented. Charles, then 71 and in the earliest, most uncertain months of the pandemic, reached for a warehouse worker as he fell, waited nearby while the man was treated, and met him again before the visit ended.
