President Donald Trump’s commitment to inflating his ego at every turn continues to lead to embarrassing public gaffes. This Monday, he shared a supposed quote from former President Ronald Reagan lauding the eventual president after he and Trump met in 1987. The problem is that — no matter how nice Trump thinks the quote sounds — there is no evidence that Reagan ever uttered it.
The first time the quote got seemingly publicly attached to Reagan was on a Trump-supporting Facebook page in mid-2016; this time, it surfaced via the president retweeting a two-year old post from a since-suspended Twitter account with only about a dozen followers. Captioning his retweet, Trump wrote:
‘Cute!’
The fake quote attached to the photo goes as follows:
‘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 a president.’
Again, there is no evidence that Reagan ever actually said that. Only in the Trump era would people have to worry about a president of the United States going on social media and rummaging through mentions of themselves and sharing some of them with their massive audience without seeming to even try and first check that the information contained in the post was accurate. Trump has been documented overall to have lied well above 10,000 times since taking office at this point — and that’s just what he’s said publicly. Imagine what it must be like to work for the guy — you’d never know… anything, really.
Obviously, some of Trump’s more egregious lies have far-reaching negative effects. For instance, he continues to claim that the import taxes he has imposed on goods from numerous countries are paid by those countries — but that’s false, they’re paid by the people doing the importing, meaning Americans. Trump’s lie to the contrary has allowed for him to justify continuing his campaign that in reality in the short term, is scraping the bottoms of American businesses’ pockets.
His lies go on from here. Although the account that posted the original tweet is suspended, as of six hours after the original post, Trump still had it up.
Check out Twitter’s response…
Featured Image via screenshot
