U.S. President Donald Trump drafted written instructions in case he dies in office, requesting a simple funeral and calling for: “No gold. No extravagance. No expensive casket. Military honors only.”
In early September 2026, people shared a rumor online that U.S. President Donald Trump drafted written instructions for a simple funeral in case he dies in office, saying he wants no gold, extravagance or expensive casket, with military honors only.
Snopes received reader mail about this matter, with one person asking whether the words in the posts were truly Trump’s.
A Facebook search for the rumor located numerous users posting the claim as a copied-and-pasted message, for example in a Sept. 8 post (archived) beginning as follows:
🚨TRUMP SAID😭 | America, if I die 😭…. Today I want you to sit down before reading this, because what I’m about to share may bring tears to your eyes and make you see Trump’s heart in a completely different way.
Purportedly, Trump has written detailed instructions about what should happen if he DIES while serving as President. And when you read what he
reportedly requested, you may realize why so many people see this as a deeply humble message. He never wanted everything to be about glory. He wanted to SERVE. Here’s what the
reported instructions say: “If I die in office: Keep funeral SIMPLE. No gold. No extravagance. No expensive casket. Military honors only — I served America, let the military honor me as they honor their own. Take ALL the money people would spend on flowers and donate it to VETERAN CHARITIES. Every dollar. And before you close my casket, read these words to America: ‘I tried. I’m sorry if it wasn’t enough. God bless America.'”
In sum, while it’s possible Trump’s administration has drafted private, internal plans in the case of his death, further research determined the specific text appearing with this rumor is false and appeared to have been written with an artificial-intelligence tool.
Searches of Bing, DuckDuckGo, Google and Yahoo did not find any news media outlets reporting about Trump penning detailed funeral instructions. If such a story truly happened, outlets worldwide would have covered the matter.
The same searches located the posts’ text as far back as a popular Instagram post (archived) from May 2026 and a webpage from March 2026.
We did not yet confirm the specific post or website where the rumor originated, or whether the claim started on an account describing its output as humor, parody or satire.
The Pangram AI detection tool displayed a 100% match for AI after scanning the post’s text. Snopes does not depend on AI detection tools for absolute reliability, instead considering the tools’ information as one of several data points toward reaching a conclusion. For Pangram, we bear in mind the platform’s strong performance in third-party and internal evaluations, and its critics, as well.
For further reading, we previously reported about a rumor claiming Trump said his funeral will draw a much bigger crowd than Iranian Ayatollah Ali Khamenei’s funeral.
