A video authentically shows a 104-year-old woman named Mabel Rose Thompson chiding U.S. President Donald Trump.
In September 2026, Snopes readers searched this website for information about a video allegedly showing a 104-year-old woman named Mabel Rose Thompson chiding U.S. President Donald Trump.
A search located a Threads post (archived) from Sept. 15 displaying the clip with the onscreen caption, “At 104, I’ve Seen 18 Presidents. Trump Was the Most Unforgettable.” That Threads post featured the TikTok watermark for a user who previously posted (archived) the video and garnered more than 2 million views.
The video begins with the elderly woman saying she’s seen 18 presidents during her lifetime — a number that would mean, given her age, that Warren G. Harding would have been her first president:
Mabel Rose Thompson here. I’m 104 years old. I’ve seen 18 presidents sit in that office. And I’m going to tell you something that will make half of you furious and the other half want to buy me a drink.
Donald Trump was the worst man I have ever watched lead this country. Not because of taxes, not because of tariffs, not because of any policy you want to argue about at Thanksgiving. Because of character, because of what he did to the American heart. Because in 104 years, I have never seen a president who worked harder to make good people hate each other.
Now before you start typing, let me establish my credentials. I was born in 1922. I was 9 years old when Herbert Hoover was still in office. And I remember my father cursing his name at our kitchen table because the man couldn’t stop the hunger. I was 20 when Franklin Roosevelt died. My mother wept at the radio. I was 41 when they shot Kennedy in Dallas. I was folding laundry when the news came on. I dropped a towel and didn’t pick it up for an hour. I was 53 when Nixon got on that helicopter, waving that ridiculous double peace sign, flying away in shame.
I have voted in every single presidential election since 1944. I have lived under Democrats and Republicans and men so boring you forgot they were there. I have watched them all. And I am telling you plain, none of them, not Nixon, not Johnson, not anyone, none of them damaged the soul of this country the way that man did.
Further searches for the “At 104, I’ve Seen 18 Presidents” caption, as well as a reverse image search, yielded what appeared to be the original video (archived) posted on the Real Talk With Time YouTube channel (archived). That clip displayed the same title, “At 104, I’ve Seen 18 Presidents … Trump Was the Worst.” It also displayed YouTube’s user-enabled label for artificial-intelligence content — a descriptor creators can select when they upload a video.
In sum, the video is fake and was generated using AI. “Mabel Rose Thompson” is a fake name. An AI tool generated the elderly woman, the room in which she supposedly sat and all of the visible objects in it.
Snopes emailed the YouTube channel’s owner to ask what tools were used to make the videos, what inspired the clips and whether the channel’s content is created simply to make money. The channel’s only members-only video (watchable with a free trial that becomes a $9.99 recurring payment in the second month) showed a thumbnail image of a purported 112-year-old woman promising to tell how she avoided the diseases that killed her friends. We’ll update this article if we receive further information.
Detecting signs of AI
Beyond the YouTube video’s AI label, the elderly woman’s waxy-looking skin (another common tell in AI-generated images) confirms its artificiality.
Readers can spot another of the more common signs of AI content by examining the area behind the old woman. The bookshelf is filled with books, none of which appear to have legible letters and numerals on their spines. According to Northwestern University’s Kellogg Insight blog, illegible text is often an indicator of AI-generated images and videos.
A scan of one of the video’s still frames by the Pangram AI-detection tool displayed a “Fully AI” result: “We believe that this image is fully AI-generated.” A separate Pangram scan of the video’s spoken text displayed concluded: “100% of this text is AI” and “We believe that this entire text is AI.”
Snopes doesn’t depend solely on AI detection tools, which vary in reliability, and instead considers the tools’ results as one of several data points toward judging an image’s authenticity. For Pangram, we bear in mind the platform’s strong performance in third-party and internal evaluations, as well as criticisms of the tool.
For further reading, we previously debunked an AI-generated image supposedly showing quadruplet sisters posing with a cake on their 90th birthday.
