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A June 2019 Facebook post offered a photograph of Gene Hackman along with a putative quote from actor proclaiming that Donald Trump could easily turn out to be one of the best presidents that America has ever seen: Putting unlikely (particularly pro-Trump) statements in the mouths of celebrities became something of a cottage industry for fake news promulgators around the time of the 2016 U.S. presidential election, and this item was one of that ilk. This quote did not originate with a genuine statement from the Academy Award-winning actor, but rather with a November 2018 article from the (no longer active) coolinfo24.com junk news site reporting on a supposed interview with Hackman: The coolinfo24.com article actually used a truncated version of a statement attributed to Sheffield-born entrepreneur and nightclub owner Peter Stringfellow, which the South Yorkshire Times reported on when Stringfellow passed away in June 2018. According to the Times, Stringfellow met Trump at a party thrown by Hackman in the 1980s, and when Trump was inaugurated as the 45th president of the United States in January 2017, Stringfellow offered the much more ambiguous statement that Trump could turn out to the be one of the best presidents that America has ever seen ... or one of the worst:
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