Quick Take
A resurfaced meme claims, falsely, that Eric Trump said on Fox News that the “President should be able to choose Governors, Senators, and Congressmen.” The quotation appears to have originated on a Facebook page that calls its content “parody.”
Full Story
A popular meme that has swirled on social media for months wrongly attributes a statement about presidential power to Eric Trump, one of President Donald Trump’s sons.
“The President should be able to choose Governors, Senators, and Congressmen, just like our Founders meant it to be. The only election should be for President,” the bogus statement, shared again on Facebook this week, reads.
Of course, the founders didn’t intend for the president to select “Governors, Senators and Congressmen.” And there’s no support for the assertion that Trump ever said that.
The remark attributed to Eric Trump — executive vice president of the Trump Organization — further purports that the quotation was made on Fox News on Nov. 5, 2018.
Trump did indeed appear on Fox News Business that day to talk about the 2018 midterm elections and tout his father’s record as president. The following day, he joined the hosts of “Fox & Friends” and made another push for Republicans to vote.
But in neither of those interviews did Trump make the statement attributed to him.
The meme appears to have been first published by a Facebook group called “Stop the World, the Deplorables Want Off.” That page describes itself as “a mixture of political memes & messages” that makes “a lot of parody posts & those are NOT meant to be taken seriously.”
We previously wrote about a quotation falsely attributed to Eric Trump’s older brother — Donald Trump Jr. — that also originated on that page.
When that group posted the meme about Eric Trump in November, the image included a watermark with the URL to the group’s Facebook page. But the version of the meme posted June 3 by a different Facebook group does not include the watermark indicating the remark was shared by a page that purports to publish “parody posts.”
Editor’s note: FactCheck.org is one of several organizations working with Facebook to debunk misinformation shared on social media. Our previous stories can be found here.
Sources
Berman, Corey. “Viral Meme Makes Up Trump Jr. ‘Quote.’” FactCheck.org. 16 Nov 2018.
“Eric Trump: US economy is winning.” Video. Fox News. 5 Nov 2018.
“Eric Trump’s Election Day message: America is winning.” Video. Fox News. 6 Nov 2018.
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