FACT CHECK: Did Donald Trump’s Mother ‘Hope He Never Goes Into Politics’?
Brad Sylvester on December 27, 2019
An image shared on Facebook more than 300 times alleges President Donald Trump’s mother Mary Anne Trump said of her son, “Yes, he’s an idiot with zero common sense, and no social skills, but he IS my son. I just hope he never goes into politics. He’d be a disaster.”
Verdict: False
There’s no record of Mary Anne Trump ever saying the quote.
Fact Check:
Mary Anne Trump, an immigrant from Scotland, married Fred Trump in 1936. She had five children with him: Maryanne Trump Barry, Fred Trump Jr., Elizabeth Trump Grau, Donald Trump and Robert Trump.
An image alleges in a post that Mary Anne Trump made a disparaging remark about Donald Trump. It does not give a citation for the quote making the rounds on social media.
“Yes, he’s an idiot with zero common sense, and no social skills, but he IS my son,” the Facebook post quotes her as saying. “I just hope he never goes into politics. He’d be a disaster.”
However, the Daily Caller News Foundation found no record of Mary Anne Trump ever saying the quote attributed to her in the Facebook post. A search of news archives and interviews didn’t yield any matches. It only seems to appear in memes and social media posts.
Other fact-checkers have also been unable to find any credible sources linking Mary Anne Trump to the quote.
If Mary Anne Trump had said such a negative thing about her son before her death in 2000, it likely would have been picked up by the media when Donald Trump publicly considered running for president in the late ’90s, but no news outlets reported on it.
The alleged quote didn’t come up during Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign either.
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