WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump shared an outlandish conspiracy theory Saturday night on social media saying former President Joe Biden had been “executed in 2020” and replaced by a robotic clone, the latest example of the president amplifying dark, false material to his millions of followers.

Trump reposted a fringe rant that another user had made on the president’s social media platform, Truth Social, just after 10 p.m. Saturday. The White House did not respond to requests for comment on the post about Biden, whom Trump has targeted for criticism almost daily since the start of his second term.

The president has blamed Biden for all manner of societal ills and assailed his mental acuity, including with the specious theory that Biden’s aides used an autopen to enact policies and issue pardons without Biden’s knowledge. (Trump has acknowledged that his administration uses the autopen system on occasion.)

Trump and His Cabinet Promote Baseless Theories

Trump has long had a penchant for sharing debunked or baseless theories online, but his embrace of conspiracies is not limited to social media. He has also elevated false claims inside the White House and surrounded himself with Cabinet officials promoting such theories.

Last month, while sitting next to the president of South Africa in the Oval Office, Trump claimed that white South African farmers were victims of mass killings and displayed an image intended to back up his assertion; the image was actually of the conflict in eastern Congo. Trump has falsely asserted that white South Africans are victims of genocide, even though police statistics do not show that white people in the nation are any more vulnerable than other groups.

Trump’s first four years in the White House were filled with false or misleading statements — according to one tally, he made 30,573 of them, or 21 a day on average — and he repeatedly shared conspiracy theories in the lead-up to the 2024 election.

Trump Loves to Retweet Secretive Plots

A New York Times analysis of thousands of Trump’s social media posts and reposts over a six-month period in 2024 found that at least 330 of them described both a false, secretive plot against Trump or the American people and a specific entity supposedly responsible for it. They included suggestions that the FBI had ordered his assassination and accusations that government officials had orchestrated the Capitol riot on Jan. 6, 2021.

Trump’s repost of the robot conspiracy theory came a day after Biden told reporters that he was feeling good after beginning treatment for an aggressive form of prostate cancer. Trump has suggested that Biden’s diagnosis last month was not new and had been concealed from the public.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

By Zolan Kanno-Youngs

c.2025 The New York Times Company