Did Reagan predict Trump’s presidency after shaking his hand? Fact Check

ByCraig Haley

A quote is spreading allegedly uttered by Ronald Reagan that claims the former US president said it was “like shaking hands with a president” after a meeting with Donald Trump in the 1980s while Reagan was in the White House.

FALSE

The quote is typically attached to a photo of Reagan and Trump shaking hands.

For the life of me, and I’ll never know how to explain it, when I met that young man, I felt like I was the one shaking hands with the president.

The quote does not appear to be genuine. The photo itself is genuine and was taken in the Blue Room at the White House during Reagan’s tenure as President. It was taken in November 1987 during a meet and greet at a reception for members of an art and preservation in embassies foundation.

However there is no record of former President Reagan ever claiming that it was like “shaking hands with the president”, and perhaps most tellingly, this quote only surfaced (and became attached to the image of the pair shaking hands) in 2016, almost thirty years after the photo was taken and 12 years after Reagan’s death.


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Again, suspiciously, it appears one of the first (if not the first) appearance of this quote was from the notoriously unreliable “The Trump Train” social media channel that frequently posts false information and inaccurate quotes.

Fact Check website Politifact have already reached out to the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library regarding the supposed quote, and were told by the Chief Administrative Officer Joanna Drake that “He did not ever say that about Donald Trump“.

Note: In July 2019, President Trump himself retweeted the false quote along with the message “Cute!” after it was posted by a Twitter channel named Reagan Battalion, a spoof channel from the popular conservative channel The Reagan Battalion. Soon after Trump retweeted the fake image, the spoof Reagan Battalion channel was suspended by Twitter.

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