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Donald Trump has retweeted a fake Winston Churchill quote shared by Piers Morgan.
The Good Morning Britain presenter is inexplicably one of the 47 accounts Trump follows on Twitter, giving the president daily updates on Brexit, Arsenal FC and never-ending British media drama.
Last night, Trump shared an old Morgan tweet (from 15 October) which shows a picture of Churchill with the caption “You have enemies? Good. That means you’ve stood up for something, sometime in your life.”
Picture: Twitter
The president was presumably retweeting the post in reference to his ongoing impeachment battle with Democrats in Congress.
Unfortunately, it’s not a real Churchill quote.
As Politifact explained in September 2019:
This quote does not belong to Churchill. It could not be found on the International Churchill Society’s website or in the Churchill Archive, which contains more than 800,000 pages of original documents.
It is also included in the running list of "All the ‘Quotes’ Winston Churchill Never Said" by Richard Langworth, senior fellow at the Hillsdale College Churchill Project.
The quote is believed to have originated from a similar quote by Victor Hugo in his 1845 essay “Villemain”, according to the fact-checking website.
It is also weirdly attributed to Eminem sometimes...
It seems unlikely that Trump knows the Churchill quote isn’t real, but it is also unclear if Morgan knows that he’s shared a fake quote.
The presenter originally posted the image during a row over his repeated mockery of LGBT+ rights in relation to transgender people and does not appear to have made a statement acknowledging that the quote isn’t real.
But he has drawn attention to the retweet today - perfectly setting up another pile-on against him in the comments...
We hope he’s enjoying the attention.
The incident is another reminder that we now live in a world where “President retweets TV host’s fake Churchill quote” is just a normal part of the news-cycle.
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