President Donald Trump shared a fabricated Denzel Washington quote calling him “a great friend and an even better president” on Monday, Oct. 12, 2026.
The post on Trump’s Truth Social platform was a screenshot of an image put up Oct. 10 by “Red Eagle Updates,” a pro-Trump X account with more than 700,000 followers. That post opened with one word: “BOOM.”
The image quoted the actor as saying: “I’ve worked with a lot of people in my life, and I’ve never met anyone braver, smarter, or who cares more about America than Donald Trump. He’s a great friend and an even better president. I’m proud to be a steadfast supporter, and I’ll never apologize for it. God bless America and our president.”
‘No Idea Where It Came From’
Washington never said it. There is no record of the actor making the statement at all.
Alan Nierob, president of PMK Entertainment and Washington’s publicist, told The Washington Post the quote was “not real” and that he had “no idea where it came from.”
The fact-checking website Snopes reported that the same line had already been pinned on two other celebrities, Mick Jagger and Matthew McConaughey. MeidasTouch and Mediaite flagged the quote as fake on the morning of Oct. 12, hours after Trump posted it.
Washington has generally stayed out of politics. Federal records show he gave money to two Democratic presidential candidates: Barack Obama in 2008 and Hillary Clinton, who ran against Trump, in 2016.
Phony claims that the actor had declared himself a Trump supporter have circulated for years. His team spoke out in 2016, after a bogus story claiming he backed Trump spread following Trump’s first election to the White House, and again years later when a satire page produced a new made-up story about him endorsing the president.
McConaughey, Mick Jagger and the Pope
The quote is a template. Near-identical Facebook posts have credited the same words to actors Matthew McConaughey, Kurt Russell, Whoopi Goldberg and Rowan Atkinson; singers Mick Jagger, Marc Anthony, P!NK, Post Malone, Sammy Hagar, Scotty McCreery, Hannah Harper and Jamal Roberts; golfer Rory McIlroy; former NFL coach Mike Tomlin; and former Fox News host Bill O’Reilly.
It has also been credited on social media to Pope Leo XIV, the first American pontiff, who has clashed with Trump over his harsh crackdown on immigration and his war on Iran.
A Fake Reagan Quote in 2019
Trump has used his social media accounts both to make false claims of his own and to spread false claims from others, including conspiracy theories and invented quotes.
In 2019, he shared a glowing but fake quote about himself that an obscure account had wrongly attributed to former President Ronald Reagan. In the spring of 2026, he shared a fake quote attacking Obama that a pro-Trump commentator had wrongly attributed to Republican Sen. John Kennedy.
Copies of the Washington post spread quickly across social media once Trump amplified it. The U.S. midterm elections are less than a month away, and the results could reshape his second term.
Trump has chosen to make that election about his record in office, even as polling shows his approval rating in the mid-to-low 30s, the lowest of his political career.
