Is Walmart leaving US due to tariffs, as Rachel Maddow allegedly reported?
On Jan. 5, 2026, the YouTube channel Maddow’s Brief uploaded a video of TV presenter Rachel Maddow reporting that the retail giant Walmart was supposedly planning to pull out of the U.S. market due to downstream affects of tariffs enacted by President Donald Trump. According to the video, the tariffs had caused grocery prices to rise, making it much harder for the company to justify its massive operational presence in the country.
Snopes readers wrote in, asking us to verify whether the video of Maddow was real or fake, and if there was any truth to Maddow’s supposed report about Walmart. We concluded that the video was fake, and there was no truth to the claim Walmart was leaving the country. YouTube removed the video and terminated the channel from its site Jan. 6, 2026.
(YouTube channel Maddow’s Brief)
There were clear indications that the video was generated by an artificial intelligence tool, while searches of Bing, DuckDuckGo, Google and Yahoo found no that credible news outlets had reported about Walmart’s supposed pivot. Such a business decision coming from Walmart, a company that the AI-generated Maddow accurately described as “essentially synonymous with the American retail landscape,” would make major headlines if true.
Snopes began investigating the video by looking at the channel that uploaded it, Maddow’s Brief. The channel’s description implied that it was a new project of Maddow’s focused on “a deep-dive analysis of the complex, critical, and often overlooked trade relationship between the United States and Canada.”
However, Maddow’s show on MS NOW (formerly MSNBC) is called “The Rachel Maddow Show,” not “Maddow’s Brief,” and searching the internet for “Maddow’s Brief” showed that neither Maddow nor reliable news outlets had reported on the channel. This, combined with the channel’s date of creation (Jan. 1, 2026), effectively confirmed that the YouTube channel was not directly affiliated with the TV presenter. To double-check, Snopes looked through recent episodes of “The Rachel Maddow Show” for clips that matched the YouTube video, but came up empty.
The text found in the channel description for Maddow’s Brief and the text in the Walmart video’s description read as tacky and robotic, a potential sign it was AI-generated. Another sign that the videos were produced using AI tools was the YouTube channel’s remarkably fast upload rate, averaging more than one video each day, including over weekends. For comparison, “The Rachel Maddow Show” runs once a week, according to MS NOW.
Finally, while the video’s audio and visuals created a decent illusion of Maddow speaking, it was not perfect. Maddow occasionally “spoke” with weird inflections, while her mouth movements and gestures were sometimes slightly out-of-sync or nonsensical.
Maddow has been the frequent target of false rumors and faked videos. For more reading, Snopes previously checked false claims that Maddow exposed a hidden LLC run by House Speaker Mike Johnson’s wife and that she had cried on camera over renovations to the White House.
