Did Oprah try to bribe John Fetterman to vote against Trump's 'Big Beautiful Bill'? Claim doesn't add up

In March 2026, a rumor spread online claiming that U.S. Sen. John Fetterman, a Democrat from Pennsylvania, announced that the former talk show host Oprah Winfrey had offered a bribe in an attempt to sway his vote on President Donald Trump's One Big Beautiful Bill Act, signed into law on July 4, 2024. For example, a post on X from March 31, 2026 read (archived): Fetterman Drops a Bomb on Oprah: Senator John Fetterman just exposed how Oprah Winfrey allegedly tried to buy his vote on the "Big Beautiful Bill." "She had her assistant approach me and offer me $20 million to vote against the bill," Fetterman told the Senate Oversight Committee." "I told her that's not how our country works." He immediately informed Democrat leadership. Their response? "They swept it under the rug." Snopes found examples of the claim spreading on Facebook, Instagram and Threads, too. Some users seemed to interpret the rumor about Winfrey's attempted bribe as true. Snopes readers contacted us to investigate its legitimacy. (X user GOP_is_Gutless) To investigate the rumor, we first used search engines such as DuckDuckGo, Google and Yahoo. If Winfrey had truly attempted to bribe Fetterman, journalists with reputable news outlets, such as The Associated Press or Reuters, would have widely reported on it, and those search inquiries would have uncovered such evidence. That was not the case. Although we did find stories noting that Winfrey had endorsed Fetterman as a candidate in 2022, we did not find any credible reporting about her supposed bribe. Similarly, Fetterman's social media pages made no mention of such a bombshell announcement. (In fact, records show that Fetterman voted against the Big Beautiful Bill). Instead, the rumor was satire. The earliest example we found was posted to a Facebook page called America Loves Liberty. That page's description described it as "an authorized dumping ground for used ALLOD material and other profitable right-wing propaganda," and noted that "nothing on this page is real." ALLOD stands for America's Last Line of Defense — the flagship page in a whole network of satirical social media accounts, including the America Loves Liberty Page. The America Loves Liberty post also included a digitally added watermark in the bottom right corner that read "ALLOD Satire: Everything on this page is fiction." That marking was visible in every post we reviewed, and we've rated the claim labeled satire accordingly. We reached out to America's Last Line of Defense for its response to the fact that some people mistook the satirical story as real news. We will update this story if we receive a response. Snopes has debunked similar pieces of media before. For example, in February 2026, we alerted readers to fake stories claiming that Rev. Jesse Jackson's family said they did not want former President Barack Obama at his funeral, and that the White House had put a permanent ban on CNN. Both originated from satirical pages affiliated with America's Last Line of Defense. Since the effectiveness of satire is subjective, we use "originated as satire" or "labeled satire" ratings based on creators' description of their work. It's your call on whether you agree.