Claims Trump’s Mom Called Him an ‘Idiot With Zero Social Sense’ Aren’t Grounded in Evidence

For years, internet users have claimed that Mary Anne MacLeod Trump, the mother of U.S. President-elect Donald Trump, once called her son “an idiot with zero common sense” and predicted that he would be a “disaster” as a politician.

The full quote, as it appeared in posts on social media platforms including X (archived) and Reddit (archived), read: “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.”

(X user @TaraLOGrady)

We first looked into the authenticity of this quote in 2019 and found no evidence Trump’s mother had ever made such a statement. Other publications, such as PolitiFact and Reuters, also fact-checked the quote and found no proof it was real.

Because digital archives of newspapers, books, and magazines grow and change over time — meaning that it’s always possible for new evidence for historical claims to become available — we took another look at the quote after it began circulating again in the months during and after Trump’s campaign and eventual victory in the 2024 U.S. presidential election.

In short, just as in 2019, we found no compelling evidence to support claims of the quote’s veracity at the time of this writing.

We ran searches for the full quote as well as the distinctive clauses “he’s an idiot with no common sense” and “I just hope he never goes into politics” on Newspapers.com and Gale OneFile, both of which are large databases of periodicals, and found no evidence to support the quote’s authenticity. We also searched for the quote on Google Books and the Internet Archive, which likewise returned no evidence that the quote ever appeared with secure attribution in any legitimate publication.

A Google search for the quote found no instances of the quote at all before 2019, nearly two decades after Mary Anne MacLeod Trump’s August 2000 death. The absence of any evidence of a quote dating within the alleged originator’s lifetime is a common red flag for fake or misattributed quotes.

One development since 2019 was the emergence of what appeared to be a newspaper clipping showing the quote underneath a photo of Trump and his mother, which appeared (archived) to have first circulated (archived) online in June 2020. Examples of the clipping, which did not include the name of the paper in which it was allegedly published or a date, appeared (archived) in numerous (archived) posts on X (archived) in 2024.

(X user @RobertCStern)

However, we found no evidence that the clipping was genuine. Although the alleged clipping included a genuine photo of Trump and his mother that was prominently featured in a 2016 New Yorker article titled “Donald Trump’s Immigrant Mother,” we found no instances of the photo paired with the quote in any real newspaper or magazine.

It remains possible that a primary source proving the quote’s authenticity exists somewhere — for example, in a newspaper archive that had not been digitized by the time of this writing — and for that reason we’ve refrained from issuing a definitive rating.

Previously, we looked into the claim that Trump’s mother was an undocumented immigrant.

Sources