No, this Fox News footage isn’t about Trump’s cognitive health following garbage truck appearance

Former President Donald Trump boarded a garbage truck Oct. 30 in Wisconsin to draw attention to President Joe Biden’s recent remarks suggesting Trump’s supporters are garbage. 

Trump fumbled opening the truck door, inspiring headlines from left-leaning publications about how the Republican presidential nominee was struggling. 

“Trump nearly slips attempting to enter a garbage truck for a campaign stunt,” Salon reported.  

“Trump nearly face-plants on a garbage truck during a trashy photo-op,” HuffPost said.

Fox News also covered the campaign stop. “Trump trashes Biden’s insult in a garbage truck,” one headline said.

But a video spreading on social media takes a late-night show joke out of context and wrongly claims the conservative network was speculating about Trump’s cognitive health. 

“Fox News finally seeing it too!” a Nov. 2 Instagram post said, sharing Fox News footage of three doctors who regularly appear on the network: Dr. Marc Siegel, Dr. David Samadi and Dr. Ben Carson, who served as Trump’s secretary of Housing and Urban Development. 

As footage of Trump twice missing the truck handle plays on the right screen, the three men appear on the left screen as Fox News host Sean Hannity can be heard speaking to them. 

“Brain damage,” Siegel says in the video. “That can have effects on thinking, on memory, on gait, on how you walk, on dizziness, on balance — that’s a possibility that we need to see the records of. We need to see the records of anyone that’s around the age of 70.” Here’s what Hannity and the doctors say next:

Hannity: “That is, to me, bizarre.” 

Samadi: “There’s certainly some neurologic issue going on.” 

  Hannity: “Is that video we’re showing a seizure? Maybe?”

  Samadi: “It certainly could be.” 

Hannity: “Watch it right here, watch it closely here. I mean it’s a violent, violent repetitive jerking.” 

Carson: “There’s a lot that can be determined by medical experts if we have access to the records and for such an important job — such a position — there’s no way we should even consider doing it without having a look at those records.” 

But this video was altered. And the Instagram post sharing it was flagged as part of Meta’s efforts to combat false news and misinformation on its News Feed. (Read more about our partnership with Meta, which owns Facebook, Instagram and Threads.)

The Fox News footage is authentic but it’s from August 2016, when Hannity and Siegel, Samadi and Carson — guests on his show “Hannity” — speculated about the health of then-Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton. As we’ve previously reported, Hannity picked up on speculation that a June 2016 video showed Clinton having a medical episode on camera. In reality, she was feigning astonishment as reporters questioned her about the campaign. 

“The Daily Show” took the 2016 Fox News footage, which originally showed the video of Clinton acting astonished, and replaced it with footage of Trump trying to open the garbage truck door. 

This was no secret: The late-night show posted it Oct. 31 on X with the caption, “Fox News freaking out about Hillary’s health in 2016 but make the footage Trump.” 

We rate claims this altered video is an authentic Fox News report about Trump’s health False.