Trump’s Power Move Made Him Look Desperate When He Pressed the Saudi Crown Prince for Praise — and the Prince’s Reaction Showed Who Was Really in Control
Trump’s grin has become its own storyline: stable at first glance, then one offbeat video drops and the entire arrangement looks like it’s clinging on for dear life.
A fresh clip from his latest meeting sent the internet into detective mode after a simple laugh turned into something no one saw coming.
During his Nov. 18 meeting with Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, Trump leaned in to playfully slap the prince’s arm and laugh — an ordinary diplomatic moment — until viewers claimed his teeth appeared to “slip” or “fall out” mid-chuckle.
During this particular moment, Trump flat-out brushed off questions about human rights and praised the prince as a visionary leader.
However, the moment that hijacked the internet’s imagination had nothing to do with politics or partnerships. It came from a close-up photo op after a long morning of pomp and carefully choreographed pageantry.
The clip was animated just enough for online detectives to zoom in, freeze frames, and build entire theories around what they thought they saw — whispers of Trump’s dentures supposedly “slipping” mid-laugh — even though the footage doesn’t actually confirm anything at all.
The rumor that Trump’s teeth actually fell out has been widely debunked after people re-watched the footage from the day, but that didn’t stop the internet from running wild with the idea that the former president was “gumming it” through diplomacy. In true social media fashion, the lack of evidence only made the jokes and punchlines louder, with users joking that his dentures “clocked out,” “took a union break,” or “applied for early retirement” right as the cameras were rolling.
One Threads user insisted, “The way he has to push his dentures back up is so gross to me.”
Another piled on, writing, “What a disgrace he is. His teeth falling out while fake laughing with a murderer. A national embarrassment.”
A third joked, “So a diaper, bronzer, shoe lifts, whatever is on top of his head and now dentures??”
Part of the frenzy comes from Trump’s own reputation. Many people want to believe he’s crumbling — literally and figuratively — because of how vicious he has been toward others. And his behavior during this meeting did little to slow the speculation.
In true Trump fashion, he turned his attention to the press and targeted ABC News chief White House correspondent Mary Bruce, snapping at her after she questioned the Trump family’s business dealings with Saudi Arabia.
But as the clip of Trump’s phantom dentures spread, more viewers began noticing that something about the video felt off. The quality was glitchy, the lighting warped, the motion unnatural.
“This is AI, this is in no way real….god i want to hurl,” one person insisted.
Another begged, “Please tell me this is AI. If not, that’s gross.”
Others jumped straight to medical speculation, with one user claiming, “His dentures are falling out. Another dementia sign. We are cooked.”
After Trump’s awkward laugh, delivered moments after bragging about being the best, he launched into a story about presidential protocol while taking a clear swipe at Joe Biden’s infamous fist-bump moment with MBS back in 2022. Trump insisted that when you step off a plane after a long flight and meet “the future king” and “one of the most respected people in the world,” there’s only one acceptable greeting: a full handshake. “I grab that hand. I don’t give a hell where that hand’s been,” he declared, mocking Biden’s decision to opt for a fist bump.
MBS’s awkward laugh as he patted Trump’s hand and pulled away was all it took — within seconds, viewers were tearing into the moment.
“Just grab them by the hand, you know? they let you when you’re famous they let you do anything.”
“Don’t care where that hands been huh?”
“Trump is after oil.”
“Embarrassing and weird.”
It didn’t help that this wasn’t the first time the internet fixated on Trump’s mouth.
During his 2024 livestream with Elon Musk on X, viewers became so distracted by his slurred speech and lisp that “dentures” trended more than 15,000 times, reviving the hashtag #DenturedDonald and resurfacing memories of a similar 2017 incident, according to The Conversation. For many, dental debates have become a recurring subplot of the Trump news cycle.
So while the rumor is baseless, the frenzy around it follows a familiar Trump-era pattern: a shaky clip, a polarized audience, and social-media creativity are more than enough to turn a split second into a spectacle.
Whether people believed his teeth slipped or that AI generated the whole thing, the viral moment shows that for fans and critics alike, few things spread faster than a conspiracy — especially one that makes people laugh at what they think they saw.
