A rumor has circulated online for years that U.S. President Donald Trump's mother, Mary Anne MacLeod Trump, once expressed serious doubts about her son's intelligence.
Social media users have posted the rumor in the form of a quote attributed to MacLeod Trump, which reads, "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."
The quote is often shared in the form of what appears to be a newspaper clipping. In early 2026, examples appeared on Instagram (archived) and Threads (archived), and Snopes readers wrote in to ask if Trump's mother really said these words about her son.
(@muhhrissaa_/Threads )
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 it is 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, there is no compelling evidence supporting the claim that the quote is authentic, as of this writing.
Searches for the full, alleged comments — 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, uncovered no evidence supporting the quote's authenticity. Searches on Google Books and the Internet Archive likewise returned no evidence that the quote ever appeared with secure attribution in any legitimate publication.
A Google search found no instances of the alleged remark at all before 2019, nearly two decades after 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 the supposed newspaper clipping featuring the in-question comment 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).
(X user @RobertCStern)
It has not been possible to find proof that the clipping is genuine. Although it 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," searches uncovered no instances of the picture 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 has not been digitized as 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.