No, President Trump Isn’t Working on 15-Year Car Loans

An announcement from the White House has been going viral in recent days, claiming that President Donald Trump is working on making 15-year car loans available to all Americans. The announcement is fake. But it’s a joke based on something very real.

“As he continues to work hard to make the American Dream accessible to everyone, President Trump today has asked the Departments of Transportation and Commerce to make vehicle ownership for all a reality by introducing 15 year car loans! Secretaries Duffy and Lutnick are already working on it!
Delivering for America!†the viral screenshot reads.

While the announcement has been circulating widely on platforms like TikTok, Instagram, Bluesky, and TikTok, it’s not real.

Where did this announcement actually come from? It appears to have originated with a satire account on X called TheRealThelmaJohnson. The tweet included a joke, along with the photoshopped announcement, that reads: “If you want to pay 100 grand for a 2009 Chevy Equinox this is the way…â€

If you want to pay 100 grand for a 2009 Chevy Equinox this is the way… pic.twitter.com/ZfQBKgJs8e

— TheRealThelmaJohnson (@TheRealThelmaJ1) November 9, 2025

And that joke is what gets at what’s funny about a 15-year car loan. The longer the car loan, the more the borrower is ultimately paying for the car thanks to interest payments. The original tweet from “Thelma Johnson†only has about 150,000 views, a very humble number for something that’s gone “viral.†That’s because it’s been widely shared on other platforms (including X, though without attribution to the original creator) and people think it’s real.

The reason many people think it’s real is that President Trump actually proposed something just as ridiculous as a 15-year car loan recently. On Nov. 8, Trump posted a graphic to Truth Social comparing himself to President Franklin D. Roosevelt, who helped popularize the 30-year mortgage during the 1930s. The graphic shows a photo of Trump with the words “50-year mortgage†underneath without further explanation.

Politico reports that the graphic actually came from a man named Bill Pulte, the director of the Federal Housing Finance Agency. Pulte reportedly visited Trump at Mar-a-Lago on Saturday with a 3×5 posterboard in hand. Roughly 10 minutes later, the graphic was posted to Trump’s Truth Social account, according to Politico. That apparently angered Trump’s aides, with Politico characterizing it as “bad politics and bad policy.â€

The idea of the 30-year mortgage was that it allowed people to live in and “own†their homes, even if it took a significant portion of someone’s life to pay it off. At the end of the mortgage, the person would at least have ownership of a property, even if they paid much more than it was worth in the end. The idea of the 50-year mortgage takes this to the extreme, especially with the median age of first-time home buyers in the U.S. currently at 40. And the only people who would be taking out 50-year mortgages would be the people in the most precarious financial positions, which means they’d be most likely to default. Even if a borrower made good on their loan agreement, the prospect of them ever actually owning the property would be slim.

Trump was asked by Laura Ingraham on Fox News about the proposal on Monday, and he didn’t back down from the idea. “All it means is you pay less per month,†Trump said. “Pay it over a longer period of time. It’s not like a big factor. It might help a little bit.â€

And all of this ridiculousness brings us to the idea of the 15-year car loan. It’s a joke, but plenty of high-profile X accounts seem to think it’s real, including Unusual Whales and Polymarket. When one account racked up 1 million views and faced skepticism from other users, she linked to a tweet from AF Post that she suggested was some kind of proof the White House was considering it.

In reality, AF Post (America First Post) isn’t a real, credible news outlet. It’s affiliated with white supremacist Nick Fuentes, and it posts fake garbage all the time. But AF Post has a blue checkmark, which anyone can buy for $8 from Elon Musk, and some people are under the illusion that it still carries some weight of “verification.â€

The “Thelma Johnson†account often shares fake White House announcements, so the next time you see something like that, which sounds too good to be true, maybe check that specific account to see if they were the first one to post it. That’s what we do here at Gizmodo whenever we see a ridiculous tweet that reads “this post has been deleted.†There’s one particular prankster who likes to do that one, and we always check their account when something similar goes viral.

If you fell for the claim that Trump was proposing 15-year car loans, don’t be too hard on yourself. This is the president who has recently posted AI-generated videos of himself dumping literal shit on protesters and another about a fake bed that magically cures all disease. Our current reality is beyond parody, and it takes time to fact-check all of the false claims swirling around the internet these days.