No, Trump Did Not Recently Call for a ‘Complete Shutdown’ of Muslims in the US

The video dates back to December 2015 and was taken before Trump's first term as US' president.

A 10-year-old video of US President Donald Trump has gone viral with the misleading claim that he called for a 'complete shutdown' of Muslims entering the US after the Pahalgam terror attack.

(Source: X/Altered by The Quint)

A video showing United States President Donald Trump standing a podium, while calling for a "total and complete shutdown of Muslims" in the US has gone viral on social media.

What is he saying?: In the clip, Trump is heard saying,

"Donald J Trump is calling for a total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States until our country's representatives can figure out what the hell is going on!"

The claim: The clip is being shared as 'Big breaking' news from the US and some users have linked it to the recent terror attack and Jammu and Kashmir's Pahalgam.

An archived version of this post can be seen here.

(Source: X (formerly Twitter)/Screenshot)

(Archived versions of more posts sharing this claim can be seen here, here, and here.)

But...?: No, The clip is old and has no connection to the terrorist attack in Pahalgam.

• We were able to trace it back to December 2015, when Trump was campaigning for the 2016 US Presidential elections in South Carolina.

How did we find out the truth?: We ran a keyword search using Trump's statement — "total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the united states" — on Google, which led us to several news reports from December 2015.

We came across reports by the BBC, NPR, and The Washington Post.

(Source: Google/Altered by The Quint)

• As per the BBC's report, Trump had issued a (now inaccessible) campaign statement in which he spoke about preventing Muslim immigration into the United States on 7 December 2015.

• It was issued in the wake of a shooting which claimed 14 lives in California's San Bernardino, after a "radicalised" couple opened fire at a health center, the report noted.

• It added that he made the same statement a few hours later at a campaign rally in South Carolina.

• We also found the video used in the viral claim, which was shared by British news organisation Sky News on 8 December 2015.

• When we looked for any pages carrying the original statement, we found an archived version of it, which carried the same sentence as heard in the viral claim.

The statement carried a verbatim version of what Trump said in his 2015 speech.

(Source: Archive.ph/Screenshot)

Conclusion: A 2015 statement by US President Donald Trump has gone viral with the false claim that he spoke about the "total and complete shutdown" of Muslims entering the US after the Pahalgam terror attack.

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