Trump shares parody account’s fake Reagan quote predicting his rise to presidency

8 Jul, 2019 17:55 / Updated 5 years ago

During his daily morning tweet storm, President Donald Trump shared a flattering quotation from former President Ronald Reagan which suggested he would someday win the White House. There’s just one problem: Reagan never said that.

The president retweeted the post on Monday, which contained a message informing “weak conservatives” they are “no match for ‘we the people,’ and our president,” with the questionable quote superimposed across a photo of a young Trump shaking hands with President Reagan.

“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 quote reads.

While the photo is genuine, the quotation is a fake. As Politifact reported earlier this year, there is no evidence to support the idea that Reagan ever spoke or wrote the words attributed to him in the image.

“He did not ever say that about Donald Trump,” said the chief administrative officer of the Ronald Reagan Presidential Foundation and Institute, Joanne Drake.

Many online were quick to point out the president’s error, and one person noted that he had retweeted a two-year-old post, apparently from a parody account poking fun at the Reagan Battalion, a conservative media outlet and Twitter handle.

“Why is Trump retweeting a 2 year old tweet from a Reagan Battalion ‘parody’ account with only 5 tweets,” the commenter asked.

The unfortunate Twitter gaffe comes on the heels of another embarrassing moment for President Trump, who recently blamed a teleprompter malfunction after suggesting in a speech that airports were involved in America’s Revolutionary War, though planes would not be invented for at least another century.

Also on rt.com ‘Not a good feeling’: Trump blames teleprompter malfunction for ‘airports’ gaffe

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