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The White House declined to explain why President Trump did not appear to realize that the photograph he held up on social media had been altered.
April 30, 2025, 6:28 p.m. ET
During an interview with Terry Moran of ABC News on Tuesday, President Trump insisted that the man his administration had mistakenly deported to El Salvador had a gang name tattooed on his hand.
“On his knuckles,” Mr. Trump said, “he had MS-13.”
Pause the tape. Rewind it to about a week earlier, when Mr. Trump in a social post held up a photograph of the man, Kilmar Abrego Garcia, showing him with four tattoos, one on each finger. There was a leaf, a smiley face, a cross and a skull. Above those symbols the alphanumeric term “MS13” had been superimposed onto the photo, essentially serving as a caption, decoding the tattoos. (Some gang experts have questioned whether they are truly MS-13 symbols.)
In the interview with Mr. Moran, the president appeared to believe that the characters that had been typed onto the photo he triumphantly held up in his social media post were in fact tattoos themselves. Mr. Moran gingerly tried to correct the record about that, but Mr. Trump was having none of it.
“Wait a minute,” he said. “Hey, Terry. Terry. Terry.”
Mr. Moran tried again: “He did not have the letter —”
“Don’t do that,” Mr. Trump cut in. “M-S-1-3. It says M-S-1-3.”
When Mr. Moran said that those characters had been photoshopped onto the picture, Mr. Trump looked positively mutinous. The exchange went around and around as the president continued to claim, with increasing exasperation, that these numbers and letters that he so badly wanted the world to see did in fact exist in ink on this man’s knuckles.
He could not bring himself to admit that Mr. Abrego Garcia did not have the words “MS-13” tattooed on his hand.
