Trump shares false claim that Obama earned $40 million in ‘royalties’ from Obamacare | Donald Trump

Donald Trump promoted the false claim that Barack Obama earned $40 million in “Obamacare-related royalties” in a message to his 11 million followers on Truth Social on Sunday.

The fictional claim that the former US president receives royalties for the use of his name to refer to the Affordable Care Act, which he signed into law in 2010, has been repeatedly debunked since at least 2017, when it was featured on America’s Last Line of Defense, a satirical website that produces fake news designed to generate engagement from outraged conservatives.

The updated version of the claim shared by Trump on Sunday misled many of his supporters in February, when it was posted on Facebook by America’s Last Line of Defense, and on the Dunning-Kruger-Times, a satirical site run by the same man, Christopher Blair, the Maine-based “godfather of fake news.”

On Sunday morning, Trump posted a screenshot of a previous message with an image of Obama and the text: “BREAKING: DOGE has cut off $2.5 million annual payment to Barack Obama for ‘Obamacare-related fees.’ He has been collecting them since 2010, for a total of $40 million from taxpayers.

The president, who spent much of the weekend when he wasn’t playing golf mocking Obamacare on social media as Senate Democrats pushed to expand tax credits for Americans who rely on the Affordable Care Act, shared the screenshot with a single word comment: “WOW!

The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment on whether the president was aware that the report he shared was fictitious.

Blair, the owner of the network of satirical websites and social media accounts from which this claim originated, told the Guardian in 2023 that Greg Abbott, the governor of Texas, was among the “stupidest people in the country” after Abbott shared a false article about his own state in the Dunning-Kruger-Times.