Did Burkina Faso’s Military Leader, Ibrahim Traoré Reject An Invite To The U.S. Oval Office?

On March 18, 2025, an X user @zito142 posted a tweet saying that the military leader of Burkina Faso, Ibrahim Traoré, rejected an invite to the US Oval office. 

The post was accompanied by a picture of the president and a picture depicting an invite with the United States seal on it and Traoré’s name. It was captioned, “President Ibrahim Traoré rejected an invite to the USA Oval office 🫡…”

As of the time this report was published, the post had gained over 7.6 million views with thousands of reposts, likes, comments and bookmarks.

VERIFICATION

Ibrahim Traoré is the military leader of Burkina Faso. He has been in power since September 2022 after a successful coup d’etat that deposed the then interim leader, Paul-Henri Sandaogo Damiba.

To verify the validity of this claim, NV-A conducted a related keyword search on the claim and a reverse image search on the picture of the invite. The search results did not contain any related reports regarding the claim. The fact-checker also looked through the official website of the Oval Office (White House), and there was no update or notice of an invitation to Traoré or any African leader on their website. 

A reverse image search of the invite image showed a clear difference between the invite picture attached to the tweet and the official invites or notes normally sent out. The official invitation usually has the engraved logo of the US in gold on a letterhead or invitation-sized card, but the picture from this claim did not have that, but had a full colour picture of the president’s seal.

During our search, we found that similar posts about Traoré rejecting an invitation from the U.S. were posted on TikTok, here and here.

CONCLUSION 

The claim that Ibrahim Traoré rejected an invite to the U.S. Oval Office is FALSE, as there have been no reports from reliable news sources backing this claim.