Trump circulates FAKE quote that had Ronald Reagan predicting his presidency and calls it ‘cute!’ months after fact-checkers debunked it
- Trump met Reagan at the White House, a moment memorialized in a 1987 photo
- Reagan supposedly said that ‘when I met that young man, I felt like I was the one shaking hands with the president’
- Fact checkers and the Reagan Foundation have debunked the quote as phony
- Trump spread it anyway on Monday, uncritically retweeting a fan group
Donald Trump stepped into a controversy about the late president Ronald Reagan on Monday, retweeting a supposed Reagan quotation about himself that has been widely circulated but repeatedly debunked as fake.
The tweet, dating from a month after Trump’s 2017 inauguration, shows a genuine photo of a 41-year-old Trump shaking Reagan’s hand in the Blue Room of the White House in 1987.
Overlaid is a sentence attributed to the Gipper: ‘For the life of me, and I’ll never know how to explain it, when I met that young man, I felt like I was the one shaking hands with the president.’
Fact-checkers on the right and the left have pronounced it a phony. PolitiFact declared it a ‘Pants on Fire’ moment. The Daily Caller concluded ‘[t]here is no evidence of Reagan ever saying this.’
Trump on Monday labeled it ‘Cute!’
President Donald Trump promoted a fake quotation about himself, attributed to former president Ronald Reagan
The president called ‘Cute!’ a phony meme suggesting Reagan had felt in awe of Trump when the two met briefly at the White House in 1987
The Reagan Battalion, a website unaffiliated with Reagan or his family, blasted the bogus quote out 29 months ago. It came back Monday like digital flotsam.
The website’s anonymous tweeter wrote at the time: ‘Dear weak Conservatives, never forget that you are no match for “we the people,” and our president.’
Joanne Drake, chief administrative officer of the Ronald Reagan Presidential Foundation and Institute, told PolitiFact in February that the quote attributed to the 40th president about the 45th is fake.
‘He did not ever say that about Donald Trump,’ said Drake.
Te 40th president’s official foundation says there’s no record of him ever praising Donald Trump as a future successor to his office
Trump on Monday tweeted a series of items from ‘The Reagan Battalion,’ which is unaffiliated with Ronald Reagan or his presidential foundaton; this one was a victory lap about Trump’s crowd in Washington on July 4
Trump was photographed shaking Reagan’s hand at the White House on two other occasions: in August 1983 (left) and February 1985 (right)
The Reagan tweet was one of six from the same Twitter account that Trump promoted on Monday. The others consisted of visuals from his July 4 event at the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C.
One was a video of the U.S. Navy’s ‘Blue Angels’ precision flying squad soaring anove the memorial site. Another depicted fireworks from the far end of the reflecting pool.
The other three consisted of photos of the live audience who ventured downtown for the show.
‘A massive crowd that Fake News & some Dems didn’t want to Report!’ Trump wrote in his retweet.