Trump Didn’t Once Say Republicans Are the ‘Dumbest Group of Voters’

Claims have spread online for years that former U.S. President Donald Trump once told People magazine in 1998 that Republicans are “the dumbest group of voters in the country.”

“If I were to run, I’d run as a Republican,” the purported 1998 Trump quote begins. “They’re the dumbest group of voters in the country. They believe anything on Fox News. I could lie and they’d still eat it up. I bet my numbers would be terrific.”

We found no evidence that Trump ever said the quote in question.

The claim began to spread again in the summer of 2024 on social media platforms like Reddit, Threads and X. The alleged quote was shared earlier in the year, as well, on platforms including X, Facebook and TikTok. We also found the quote shared on Imgur in 2023 and TikTok in 2020.

A quote from an interview Donald Trump gave in 1998
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We previously wrote about the quote, in 2015 and 2020. People magazine previously confirmed to FactCheck.org that it had no record of having published any such interview or exchange with Trump:

People looked into this exhaustively when it first surfaced back in Oct. [2015]. We combed through every Trump story in our archive. We couldn’t find anything remotely like this quote — and no interview at all in 1998.

In 1998, People covered Trump mostly for his relationships with his first and second wives, Ivana Trump and Marla Maples. While there is evidence Trump was interested in politics during the late ’90s, nothing we found proved he ever said anything about “dumb Republicans” to any reputable publication.

We’ve continued to cover the former U.S. president during the run-up to the 2024 election, including real photos that show him with his daughter Ivanka sitting in his lap.

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