PropertyValue
?:author
?:datePublished
  • 2015-10-16 (xsd:date)
?:headline
  • Did Trump Say Republicans Are the Dumbest Group of Voters? (en)
?:inLanguage
?:itemReviewed
?:mentions
?:reviewBody
  • In mid-October 2015, a claim began appearing online holding that Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump had supposedly proclaimed Republicans are the dumbest group of voters during a 1998 interview with People magazine: Despite People's comprehensive online content archive, we found no interview or profile on Donald Trump in 1998 (or any other time) that quoted his saying anything that even vaguely resembled the statement Republicans are the dumbest group of voters. Trump appeared somewhat regularly in the magazine's pages before he came to star on The Apprentice, but the bulk of the magazine's celebrity-driven coverage of him back then centered on his marriages to, and divorces from, Ivana Trump and Marla Maples. Trump's political endeavors (or the absence of them) did rate some space on the magazine's pages, though. For example, a December 1987 profile titled Too Darn Rich chronicled Trump's later claims that he had been courted by both Democrats and Republicans: In 1988, Trump launched into an impassioned political diatribe on Oprah Winfrey's daytime talk show, but he concluded by saying he probably wouldn't [ever] run for office, not that Republicans are the dumbest group of voters. In 1998 (the year the quote in question purportedly appeared in People), Trump's political involvement was somewhat differently oriented: By October 1999, Trump had become more serious about dipping his toe in the political waters. Announcing on CNN's Larry King Live that he was forming an exploratory committee with the intention of running for president, Trump said: It's unlikely Trump would have proclaimed that Republicans are the dumbest group of voters at the same time he was announcing he was himself a registered Republicans. At around the same time in October 1998, Trump ran through his then-current political positions with NBC's Stone Phillips: Notable about the apparently spurious Republicans are the dumbest group of voters Trump quote is its purported reference to Fox News in 1998. While the Fox News Channel was rolled out across major American news markets between 1996 and 2000 (and thus isn't entirely chronologically out of place in a circa-1998 quote), the network wasn't nearly as prominent or widely watched until the 2000 election of George W. Bush, the September 11th attacks in 2001, and the start of the Iraq War in 2003. Before that time, although Fox News was making its way into living rooms across the United States, it was not exceptionally well-known (or particularly regarded as a right-leaning outlet) in 1998. (en)
?:reviewRating
rdf:type
?:url