Did Trump condemn the killing of Peanut the squirrel?

Did Donald Trump, the former and next president of the United States, condemn the killing of an internet-famous squirrel from Upstate New York?
The answer is complicated.
Peanut, a celebrity squirrel with hundreds of thousands of followers on TikTok and Instagram, and Fred the raccoon were seized last week from a home in the Southern Tier by the state Department of Environmental Conservation. The beloved pets were then euthanized so they could be tested for rabies, the DEC said.
In New York, it’s illegal to care for wildlife animals without a special permit. Peanut and Fred’s owner, Mark Longo, told the Associated Press he had been working to get his squirrel certified as an educational animal before he was confiscated by the DEC.
The decision to end the animals’ lives sparked outrage across the nation. Bomb threats were even made against DEC offices from Bath to New Paltz.
The death of Peanut, who also went by “P’Nut,” also transformed into a rallying call for Republicans just days before Election Day. JD Vance, now the vice president-elect, commented on the squirrel’s demise just days before voters headed to the polls.
“So I know Don‘s fired up about Peanut the squirrel,” Vance said Sunday during a rally in North Carolina, a video posted by the BBC shows.
According to Vance, Trump asked if Democrats had “murdered the Elon Musk of squirrels.”
“Have you seen the videos of this squirrel? He‘s like, a genius, or he was, unfortunately,” Vance said. “But the same government that doesn’t care about hundreds of thousands of illegal immigrant criminals coming into our country doesn’t want us to have pets. It’s the craziest, craziest thing.”
But did Trump himself take the time to call out the DEC for putting down Peanut and Fred?
Reuters has determined a statement claiming to be from Trump and posted on social media was fake.
The statement, topped with the Trump campaign‘s logo (and accompanied by an AI-generated image of Trump carrying an angel wing-clad Peanut on his shoulder), claimed the squirrel would’ve lived — and been given a hotel room and a $500 gift card — if he told the DEC he was from Mexico.
Trump officials told multiple publications, including the New York Post and TMZ, that the statement was fake.
But while Trump has yet to make any public statements about Peanut’s death, his campaign leaned into the controversy.
On the day before Election Day, Team Trump — the Trump campaign’s official TikTok account — shared three photos of Peanut with its 6.1 million followers.
One showed Peanut sitting in a baseball cap and was captioned: “Needlessly murdered by Democrat bureaucrats in New York.”
Another showed a ghostly image of the squirrel with his paws on Trump’s shoulders. The illustration contained a rallying cry:
“We will avenge you on Tuesday at the ballot box.”