Trump lookalike spotted in Perm in viral video

A doppelgänger of US President Donald Trump was spotted in Perm. A short video was posted on his Instagram* page by Perm resident Yevgeny Sazhin. The clip has gone viral on social media.

‘The chance of meeting Donald Trump in Perm is very small, but never equals zero,’ the video begins with this phrase.

In the frame, we see a woman in a jacket and beret, waiting for her transport at a stop with the sign ‘300 Years of Perm’.

‘Excuse me, have you noticed that you look like Donald Trump?’ the author of the video asks the woman.

‘Well, not really,’ she disagrees.

Yevgeny Sazhin explains in response that the city resident reminds him not of the US president himself, but of his female version. The interlocutor nods at her gray hair, suggesting that’s the reason. But a voice off-camera clarifies: ‘No, he is handsome and so are you.’

In less than a day, the video has garnered over 3 million views and a huge number of comments.

‘She looks more like Trump than Trump himself,’ ‘Stirlitz was never so close to failure,’ ‘I’ve always been sure that Donald Trump has Russian roots. His sister, it seems, is trying to hide this fact,’ write those who watched the clip.

We are publishing that very video: you can judge for yourself whether the Perm woman really resembles the American president that much.

Is This a Fake?

Not everyone believed in the video’s authenticity, and online we came across several comments suggesting the clip was created using artificial intelligence. How likely this is was analyzed by Shkulev Holding’s online video editor Artyom Chudinov.

‘It’s unlikely to be a fake, because now neural networks generate the frame and duration as a whole, not just some area (for example, the face),’ he noted. ‘Of course, one could make a deepfake of the face if desired, but why? The woman has features that Trump doesn’t have. It’s 95% just a similarity between the heroine and the American president. Or some incredibly advanced neurogeneration by an author with a lot of free time.’

Artyom Chudinov added that Perm in the frame is clearly real, because neural networks still cannot generate numbers and words well.

Transport correspondent Kirill Khafizov of 59.RU also agrees with the ‘authenticity’ of Perm. Our journalist determined that the video was filmed at the ‘DKZh’ stop. Moreover, the filming definitely happened recently: reflections from the media panel on the pavilion are visible in the frame, and it was installed only in the summer.

* The social network belongs to Meta Corporation, recognized as extremist and banned in Russia.

Earlier we reported how a Perm woman was deceived by a fraudster — a namesake of Donald Trump.