Fact Check: Did Crowd Chant F*** Joe Biden At Barack Obama Michigan Speech?

Niceties appear to be in short supply with less than a week left until the midterms, an election race that may determine both the shape of American politics for the next two years and, ultimately, the 2024 presidential race.

Seemingly less reluctant now to take lead in a more aggressive Democratic campaigning, former president Barack Obama's appeared in Wisconsin and Michigan last week and went for the jugular, with multiple video excerpts from the speech going viral.

Not all were impressed or placated, however, with audible voices of dissent heard in the crowd at various points of his speech and (if videos shared online are to be believed) cursing out of Obama's former running mate, president Joe Biden.

The Claim

A video posted on Twitter (archived here), on October 30, 2022, shows Barack Obama responding to chants of "F*** Joe Biden" during a recent speech in Detroit, Michigan.

Several other accounts shared the clip with similarly snarky captions, with the posts (archived here) attracting tens of thousands of views across various platforms (before at least some were removed).

The Facts

Obama's return to the frontline of Democrat campaigning was always bound to fuel as much anger on the right as it did support on the left, his legacy largely divided along the party lines.

His impassioned speeches in Wisconsin and Michigan, which have gone viral on social media, appeared to stoke hopes of a Democratic comeback in the days leading up to the midterms, even though the Republican party continues to maintain momentum.

However, while Obama's words weren't quietly embraced by the entire audience, the chants against his former running mate were added in artificially after the fact.

As multiple recordings of the speech show, while Obama was indeed responding to a single heckler in the crowd, it was difficult to hear what they were saying.

Although it sounded like the audience member had begun saying "Your president", it's not clear who their subject was or what else they shouted.

Much of what they said before they were escorted out of the venue, was drowned out by "Obama" chants from the rest of the crowd before, before the former U.S. leader responded with "Come on, this is what I mean, we are having a conversation."

"Right now, I'm talking, you'll have a chance to talk sometime later."

While we can't say for certain whether the heckler was shouting about Joe Biden or swore, the clip shared on Twitter was misleadingly edited to create that impression.

This isn't the first time that the "F*** Joe Biden" heckle has been cut into other clips, as Newsweek Fact Check has reported. When president Biden visited London in September 2022 for Queen Elizabeth II's funeral, the chant was edited into clips of the presidential motorcade driving to Westminster Abbey.

Similarly, in October 2022, a widely shared clip of Philadelphia Eagles supporters seemingly shouting the same thing at Jill Biden was also edited and did not show large sections of the crowd joining in, as as the clip attempted to portray.

The Ruling

Misleading Material.

Video of Barack Obama addressing a heckler during a speech in Detroit, Michigan, was edited with chants cursing out his former running mate. Similar audio has been spliced into several previous videos of public appearances by the president and his allies.

While the former president did respond to a heckler in the crowd, which was recorded and widely shared online, they could not be heard shouting about Joe Biden. While that doesn't mean the heckler wasn't talking about or cursing the president, their interruption is mostly inaudible in the original recording, and does not have the crowd joining in, as the doctored clip appears to suggest.

FACT CHECK BY Newsweek's Fact Check team