Did Trump say Republicans are ‘dumbest group of voters’ in 1998?

In August and September 2026, a claim recirculated online that U.S. President Donald Trump told People magazine 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.”

The claim previously spread on social media platforms like Reddit, Threads and X in the summer of 2024. We also found the quote shared on Imgur in 2023 and on TikTok in 2020.

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

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.

Our research in People’s archives, which are no longer available on its website, found that in 1998 the magazine 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.

For further reading, we examined a rumor that Trump criticized the National September 11 Memorial & Museum in New York City because he wasn’t allowed to speak at its 25th-anniversary remembrance of the 9/11 attacks.

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