During a recent interview with ABC News‘ Terry Moran in the Oval Office, Trump referenced a controversial image that purportedly depicted tattoos on Garcia’s knuckles prominently featuring the gang letters photoshopped on top of his actual tattoos.
The debate ignited when Trump proclaimed, “You’ll pick out one man, but even the man that you picked out, he said he wasn’t a member of a gang, and then they looked and on his knuckles he had MS-13.”
In trying to clarify the situation, Moran said, “There’s dispute of that.”
This two-minute exchange quickly escalated, with Trump refusing to back down from his assertion that Garcia had the letters tattooed.
Several critics took to social media to call out the commander-in-chief for being “easily fooled” by a piece of paper someone on his team handed to him.
One user on X, formerly known as Twitter, shared a clip of the Trump interview alongside the doctored photo of Abrego Garcia’s knuckle tattoos and wrote: “I don’t know which is worse, Trump losing his s— at being fact checked, or him actually not knowing that the photo is clearly a very bad Photoshop.”
Another X user commented: “Narcs are never wrong, you know. Note the sly put downs and overblown sense of grandiosity. ‘How dare you disagree with me!!'”
A third person pointed out: “I don’t think this was ‘photoshopped’ to look real. The intent was to show what each symbol represents. The fact that Trump thought the MS-13 were actually a tattoo is funny. GOP, you need to switch out your guy. Install Vance. This is just embarrassing.”
Moran confronted Trump’s claims, stating: “He had some tattoos that are interpreted that way, but let’s move on.”
The former president, however, was clearly not ready to let go of the disputed image, responding, “Wait a minute. Hey, Terry. Terry. Don’t do that.”
Trump insisted on the legitimacy of the image, stating emphatically, “Terry, you can’t do that. They’ve given you the big break of a lifetime. You know, you’re doing the interview. I picked you because, frankly, I had never heard of you, but that’s okay.”
Yet Moran’s attempts to refute Trump’s claims were met with resistance as the political figure maintained, “No, no. He had MS, as clear as you can be. Not interpreted. This is why people no longer believe the news because it’s fake news.”
Despite the back-and-forth, Trump refused to believe that the “MS-13” label had been edited onto the photo, concluding, “He’s got MS-13 on his knuckles. Okay? You do such a disservice. Why don’t you just say, ‘Yes, he does,’ and you know, go on to something else?”
As OK! previously reported, Trump held up the same edited photo of Garcia’s hand in the White House this month after Democrats protested his deportation to El Salvador, which reportedly took place due to an administrative error.