Donald Trump just shared a tweet with a fake quote from Ronald Reagan praising him
President Donald Trump shared a photo of him and former President Ronald Reagan with a quote praising him falsely attributed to Reagan on Monday, calling it "cute!" on Twitter.
- The meme included the fake quote, which claimed Reagan said, "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."
- The fact-checking site PolitiFact was able to confirm the authenticity of the photo- dated back to 1987 - but thoroughly debunked the purported Reagan quote as a "pants-on-fire" level lie.
While Reagan himself died in 2004 long before Trump became president, Reagan's daughter Patti Davis has written several op-eds criticizing Trump in the Washington Post.
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President Donald Trump shared a photo of him and former President Ronald Reagan with a quote praising him falsely attributed to Reagan on Monday, calling it "cute!" on Twitter.
The tweet he shared was posted in early 2017 by a now-inactive account called "@reaganbattalion," which appears to be an impersonation of a larger, verified conservative account called "@ReaganBattalion."
The meme included a photo of Reagan and Trump shaking hands in the 1980s with the quote, falsely attributed to Reagan, saying, "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."
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The fact-checking site PolitiFact was able to confirm the authenticity of the photo- dated back to 1987 - but thoroughly debunked the purported Reagan quote as a "pants-on-fire" level lie, verifying with an official from the Ronald Reagan Presidential Foundation and Institute that Reagan never uttered that praise of the president.
Shortly after Trump quote-tweeted the meme, the account that posted it was suspended from Twitter.
After the meme with the false Reagan quote spread around Facebook earlier this year, it was flagged on the site as misinformation.
While Reagan himself died in 2004 long before Trump became president, Reagan's son Michael Reagan predicted his father would be "confused" by Trump and "wouldn't be appreciative of the demeaning style of Donald Trump."
Reagan's daughter Patti Davis has sharply criticized Trump in interviews and has written several op-eds denouncing Trump's policies in the Washington Post.
In a March interview with Yahoo News, Davis guessed that her father would be "horrified" by the Trump presidency and accused Trump of "endangering" American democracy, and the GOP of "sitting by the sidelines" and letting it happen.
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