10 Times Trump's Stories Were Debunked By Who They Were About

Donald Trump's love affair with fast food is legendary. But while the Mickey D's fan would definitely be voted the president most likely to install golden arches in the White House, he's made 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue home of the whopper. And we're not talking about the Big Mac's beefy rival — he's told some super-sized lies over the years, often from within the walls of the People's House. Sometimes, the stars of his tall tales push back against his misremembrances and mistruths.

Trump has been caught lying about his height and other inconsequential matters, such as how many fast-food "hamberders" he served the Clemson Tigers football team at the White House in 2019. But some of his falsehoods — which topped over 30,000 during his first term, according to The Washington Post — are about more serious topics, such as the Iran war. It created confusion and uncertainty when Trump claimed that his administration had opened negotiations with Iran, only for its foreign ministry to deny that such talks took place.

When Trump said that he had chatted with an unnamed president who backed his decision to go to war, representatives for every living former POTUS — Joe Biden, Barack Obama, George W. Bush, and Bill Clinton — told AP they had no such discussions with Trump. Other subjects of his trumped-up stories have accused him of fabricating conversations about everything from permanent markers to his political rivals.

To execute all those sharp angles in his distinctive John Hancock, Donald Trump has found that nothing beats a Sharpie. He even seems to believe it's the only pen powerful enough to alter the course of a hurricane, something we learned from one of Trump's most awkward moments caught on camera. Straying far from the issues affecting average Americans during a March 2026 cabinet meeting, he had another such moment when he claimed to have spoken with someone from Sharpie about designing a personalized permanent marker with his signature emblazoned in gold.

"That's when I called the guy. I said, 'I'd like to use your pen, but I can't have a gray thing with a big 'S' on it saying 'Sharpie' as I'm signing a trillion dollar airplane contract to buy brand new fighter jets,'" he recalled (via The White House). Trump's rambling Sharpie anecdote turned out to be one of his dubious "sir" stories, which is always a red flag that it's embellished or invented. "So, the guy said to me, 'You don't have to pay me, sir, I'll give them to you for nothing," he continued. But proving that he really is a master of the art of the deal, Trump negotiated the price of the pens up to $5 a pop — when many online companies offer personalized Sharpies for less than $2 apiece.

Trump's boast about his negotiating skills only got worse when The Washington Post reached out to Sharpie's parent company, Newell Brands, which denied fielding a call from the president. "We don't have any information about the conversation described," a rep said.

In 1991, Donald Trump told the New York Post that he had dumped his then-girlfriend Marla Maples and was romantically involved with Carla Bruni, the future first lady of France. "All I can say about this is, this is the new one," he said (via BuzzFeed News). People reached out to Trump about the story and spoke to someone who identified himself as a publicist named John Miller. Of Bruni, who was working as a model at the time, Miller said, "She dropped [a big rock star, who is married] for Donald." He added that Trump had chosen Bruni over Kim Basinger, who also wanted to date him. Oh, and so did Madonna.

The story of all these actors, singers, and models swooning over Trump started falling apart when People played a recording of its interview with Miller for Maples. It was news to her that Trump had kicked her to the curb for Bruni; it was also obvious to her that Miller was really Trump. He admitted this when People did a follow-up on the story, explaining he had posed as his own publicist as a lark. "What I did became a good time at Marla's expense, and I'm very sorry," he said.

As for Bruni, she denied being Maples' replacement. "Trump is obviously a lunatic," she told Daily Mail in September 1991 (via The Spokesman-Review). "It's so untrue and I'm deeply embarrassed by it all." Trump went on to wed Maples in 1993. In 2019, Madonna told The New York Times Magazine that she also never pursued a relationship with Trump; he was the one who kept pestering her during a photoshoot at Mar-a-Lago.

During the 2024 presidential election, Donald Trump tried to weaponize Kamala Harris' age-gap fling with Willie Brown. He claimed that when Willie was serving as the mayor of San Francisco, the helicopter they were riding in together almost crashed. But the true purpose of telling this tale was to inform voters that Willie had bad-mouthed Harris to him at some point. "He told me terrible things about her," Trump recalled during a press conference, per The New York Times. 

However, Willie told the Times no such conversation or helicopter ride had taken place. It is possible that Trump confused Willie with someone who had ridden on a chopper with him before: former California governor Jerry Brown. However, Jerry's rep told the Times, "There was no emergency landing and no discussion of Kamala Harris." Because Trump had mentioned a brush with death, Nate Holden, a former California state senator, believed he was thinking about the scary helicopter ride they had survived. Like Willie, Holden is Black, and he joked to Politico, "I guess we all look alike." He also revealed Harris did not come up in their conversation.

While it seems that Trump had gotten events all muddled up in his mind, he rattled the old lawsuit saber at The Times over its reporting, and Willie vowed to retaliate with litigation of his own against Trump if he sued the newspaper. "Somebody has got to make sure that he stops lying," he told CBS News. "If he keeps it up, at some point, I'm going to give him a taste of his own conduct."

Mika Brzezinski and Joe Scarborough, the married hosts of "Morning Joe," have caused controversy by trying to remain friendly with Donald Trump while also putting him on blast on their show. But Brzezinski has learned the hard way that if you don't flatter Trump full-time on air and you're a woman, he'll go low by insulting your looks. In 2017, Trump ranted in back-to-back X posts, "How come low I.Q. Crazy Mika, along with Psycho Joe, came [he continued] to Mar-a-Lago 3 nights in a row around New Year's Eve, and insisted on joining me. She was bleeding badly from a face-lift. I said no!" At least, in recollecting this event, Trump, for once, didn't claim that people came to him with tears in their eyes.

In an opinion piece for The Washington Post, Brzezinski and Scarborough fired back at Trump, denying that they had shown up at his club unannounced in hopes of seeing him. "The president-elect invited us both to dinner ... After we arrived, the president-elect pulled us into his family's living quarters with his wife, Melania, where we had a pleasant conversation," they wrote.

The couple also denied that Brzezinski had a bloody wound from a facelift, although she did cop to getting some work done on her chin and neck. Speaking to Vanity Fair, she explained that she had divulged this information to Melania Trump. "The irony of it all is that Donald kept saying, 'That's incredible. You can't even tell. Who did it? Who did it?'" she recalled. "He kept asking for the name of the doctor." Perhaps the true reason for his bitter post was retaliation for Brzezinski's failure to share that information with him.

Long before he entered the Oval Office, Donald Trump was relishing his role as a boss on "The Apprentice." But when he got political, even the power of the presidency wasn't enough to keep the real Boss from spoiling his fun. Trump's beef with Bruce Springsteen has been one of his most heated celebrity feuds. It became evident just how much Springsteen's dislike of Trump bruised the president's ego, causing him to make a pretty outrageous claim about the Jersey icon at a 2024 campaign rally in New Jersey, of all places. 

"These liberal singers ... they all vote for me. ... you know, like Bruce Springsteen," Trump said via Right Side Broadcasting Network. "We have a much bigger crowd than Bruce Springsteen. Right?" Ignore his crowd-size insecurity for a second and focus on that first claim, as months later, Springsteen would endorse Kamala Harris. 

If Trump still harbored any delusions that Springsteen was a secret fan, the singer destroyed them in September 2025 when he told Time magazine, "If Congress had any guts, he'd [Trump] be consigned to the trash heap of history." He even wrote a song trashing Trump, "Streets of Minneapolis," and took his disgust with the president and his divisive policies on the road for his Land of Hopes and Dreams American Tour. Springsteen told The Minnesota Star Tribune that he didn't care if MAGA Americans got offended by him using his music to take on Trump. "The blowback is just part of it," he said. "I'm ready for all that."

Jimmy Kimmel has roasted Donald Trump so hard over the years that the president should be a pile of burnt-orange ash by now. However, in the annals of Trump's mind, there's a happy memory of a time when the late-night host treated him with the respect he feels he deserves. Of an appearance on Kimmel's show, Trump fondly reminisced during a rally, "He would stand outside on the sidewalk waiting for me. 'Oh, here he comes, Donald Trump!' He opens my door. I said, 'Does he do this to everybody?' to his people. 'He does it for nobody,'" (per "Jimmy Kimmel Live").

Kimmel wasn't about to let this anecdote go uncontested. After playing footage of Trump's comments on the show, he informed his audience that Trump had applied the cerebral version of a beauty filter to his recollection. "That never happened. ... Even the people who like the president know he makes things up, but still, it's weird to hear him tell a lie that specifically involves you," he said.

During another "Jimmy Kimmel Live" episode, Kimmel disputed Trump's claim that he used to appear on his show often, and he shared an anecdote of his own about his adventures on Hollywood Boulevard that was (probably) untrue. "The only time I've ever walked out on the sidewalk for Donald Trump was to urinate on his star on the Walk of Fame," he quipped.

On the HBO series "Da Ali G Show," comedian Sacha Baron Cohen conducted prank interviews as the titular persona: an ill-informed wannabe hip-hop star from suburbia. Clad in a tracksuit and durag, he wouldn't break character while calling Buzz Aldrin "Buzz Lightyear" to his face and asking him how he felt about "Louis Armstrong" walking on the moon first. He also interviewed a few notable Americans from the political realm, including Newt Gingrich, Pat Buchanan, and one person he probably did not expect to ever hold political office: Donald Trump.

Trump appeared on a 2003 episode of the show, which he randomly brought up on X in 2012. "I never fall for scams. I am the only person who immediately walked out of my 'Ali G' interview," he wrote. But check it out — Cohen said on "The Late Late Show" that this was untrue. "... actually, he was there for about seven minutes," he told host James Corden. Evidence that Trump misremembered how the interview went is evident; footage shows Trump listening to Ali G's pitch for gloves that protect hands from melting ice cream. He then makes a run for it after saying, "Well, it sounds like a good idea, and I hope you make a lot of money" (via Smarty Max). So, despite what The Donald said, it seems that Ali G really did succeed in taking him for a ride — at least for a while.

Melania Trump is the proud owner of the most expensive engagement ring in the Trump family, but for some reason, her husband doesn't want everyone to believe she's worth its hefty price tag. Proving that he might just love a good deal more than anything, he boasted to The New York Times that the ring's designer, Graff Diamonds, had given him a 50 percent discount on the $1.5 million bling, which featured a 15-carat diamond. "Only a fool would say, 'No thank you, I want to pay a million dollars more for a diamond,'" he said.

During his 2005 pre-wedding interview, Trump also bragged about how many vendors were offering him freebies for the big day. In his mind, it seems this was an important detail to share because it demonstrated the cachet his name held for brands that just wanted to be associated with it in some way. But there's a problem with his claim that being chosen as Melania's engagement ring designer was enough of an honor to merit such a massive markdown: Graff says it's totally untrue. In 2018, the jewelry company's chairman, CFO Nicholas Paine, told Forbes, "We don't sell items for publicity value." But Trump still managed to squeeze some positive publicity from that pricey stone by lying about what he paid for it.

When Marjorie Taylor Greene's friendship with Donald Trump ended in 2025, surely she trashed all of the "Trump was right about everything" hats she owned, especially since he purportedly told a mistruth about her in one of his Truth Social posts. After their falling out over a few issues, including the release of the Epstein files, Trump wrote on his social media platform, "... all I see 'Wacky' Marjorie do is COMPLAIN, COMPLAIN, COMPLAIN! She has told many people that she is upset that I don't return her phone calls anymore." According to Trump's version of events, Greene wasn't unhappy because she disagreed with some of his political decisions, but because he had discouraged her from seeking higher office in Georgia, where she was elected to Congress in 2021. Trump really twisted the knife by throwing another malicious jab at the former MAGA acolyte, writing, "I can't take a ranting Lunatic's call every day."

This came from a man whose kindness Greene praised in a 2024 post on X. "He is the most attacked and lied about man living on planet Earth," her glowing tribute to Trump read in part. So, it had to really sting when someone she defended so fiercely turned around and smeared her. "President Trump just attacked me and lied about me. I haven't called him at all, but I did send these text messages today," she wrote on X. In the text messages included in her post, she begged him to express support for Jeffrey Epstein's victims and the release of the files related to the financier's crimes, which were clearly sore subjects with Trump.

California Governor Gavin Newsom has trolled Donald Trump many times during their longstanding feud, but he couldn't avoid working with his political rival after Trump became president. Unfortunately, Trump didn't extend an olive branch to politicians on the other side of the aisle; instead, he continually tried to exert his authority over them. 

In June 2025, Trump, who had previously fantasized out loud about having Newsom arrested, claimed that he and the governor spoke about his plan to deploy the National Guard in Los Angeles in response to the protests against ICE. Amid their back-and-forth about what they discussed during a call, Trump said on the "Pod Force One" podcast, "The phone call was to deploy the troops. ... I said, 'You know, your city's burning down. Your state is in bad trouble.'" But according to Newsom, Trump never mentioned sending the National Guard to patrol the streets of L.A. "He lied. On my mother and dad's grave," Newsom said on "The Daily" podcast. "I don't mess around when I say this. He lied. Stone cold liar."

In 2025, Trump also gave the old "killing them with kindness" strategy his own MAGA spin by claiming that Maryland Governor Wes Moore, another Democrat, paid him quite the compliment when they chatted at the Army-Navy game. "He said, 'Sir, you're the greatest president of my lifetime,'" Trump told the press (via X). But Moore disputed Trump's recollection of their interaction, telling WBAL Radio (via Newsweek), "When I say that conversation never happened, that imaginary conversation never happened." In this case, there was video evidence supporting Moore's claim that Trump's imagination had just run away with him again.