Trump shares fake Ronald Reagan quote from Twitter user who has been suspended
On Monday, President Trump retweeted a photo showing him shaking hands with President Reagan decades ago, in 1985, with what was presented as a quote attributed to Reagan stamped across it: "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."
"Cute!" Mr. Trump wrote, retweeting the photo. But that retweet soon disappeared. The quote was fake and the account that shared it has been suspended from Twitter.
It's true that Mr. Trump met President Reagan in the 1980s, but Reagan never weighed in on the young Trump's presidential qualities. Several Twitter users replied to Mr. Trump to inform him that the quote was false. The president's retweet drew attention to the Twitter page that had shared it, which appeared to be an imposter of the popular Twitter account "Reagan Battalion."
The real "Reagan Battalion" Twitter has nearly 100,000 followers and offers "news, information, and commentary, from a conservative perspective," according to its bio. However, the Twitter account the president retweeted was stealthily misspelled "Reagan BattaIion."
Twitter bans impersonation and removes Twitter accounts "that pose as another person, brand, or organization in a confusing or deceptive manner."
But the now-defunct Twitter account is not the first social media entity to share the fake Reagan quote. In February, when the image was shared on Facebook, the fact-checking site PolitiFact reached out to the the Ronald Reagan Presidential Foundation and Institute to set the record straight. "He did not ever say that about Donald Trump," the institute's chief administrative officer, Joanne Drake, told PolitiFact.
The photo or similar ones showing the fake Reagan quote have been in circulation online since at least 2016, when another fact-checking site, Snopes, first declared the quote false.
President Reagan and Donald Trump did meet once – the photo of them is real. But Mr. Reagan did not ever guess that Mr. Trump would be president.
