On Tuesday, President Donald Trump held an event with NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg to discuss defense spending by European countries. While expressing disappointment in Germany's budget, he said he still respects the country as an ally. The 72-year-old then made a bizarre false statement regarding his father's heritage.
“I have great respect for Angela [Merkel, the German chancellor] and I have great respect for the country,” Trump told reporters. "My father is German. Right. Was German. And born in a very wonderful place in Germany and so I have a great feeling for Germany."
In fact, Fred Trump was born in the Bronx neighborhood of New York City in 1905, according to his birth certificate. Strangely, this is not the first time Donald Trump made this false statement. In July 2018, he told Fox Business Network’s Maria Bartiromo, "[Both] My parents were born in the European Union. I love those countries, Germany and all of the countries, Scotland." (Indeed, his mother, Mary Anne MacLeod, was born in Scotland, but Fred Trump was born in The Bronx.)
That same month, Trump repeated the false claim, while speaking with CBS News. "Don’t forget. both my parents were born in EU sectors, okay?" Trump said, in response to a question about European trade. "I mean, my mother was Scotland, my father was Germany. And, you know I love those countries." Later in July, he repeated the false claim once more, during a press conference in Brussels.
Donald Trump does have German ancestry. His grandparents Frederick and Elizabeth Trump were born in Germany, then immigrated to America after getting married. However, he falsely claimed Swedish entry in 1987's Art Of The Deal, writing that Frederick "came here from Sweden as a child." and his father Fred "was born in New Jersey in 1905."
According to a New York Times report in 2016, Trump's family claimed Swedish heritage for a long time, due to the unpopularity of Germany during the World Wars. "[Fred Trump] had thought, ‘Gee whiz, I’m not going to be able to sell these homes if there are all these Jewish people,’” said John Walter, Donald Trump’s cousin and the family historian. "After the war, he’s still Swedish. It was just going, going, going."
As one Twitter user noted, it's "ironic that [Donald Trump] cannot keep his own family origins straight given his obsession with that of [Barack] Obama and Elizabeth Warren."
Trump frequently mocks Senator Warren, calling her "Faux-cahontas" over her spurious claim to Native American heritage. After taking a DNA test, Warren released the results, which revealed she is merely between 1/64th and 1/1,024th Native American. She later apologized to the Native American community, attributing her "confusion" to inaccurate family stories.
Meanwhile, former President Barack Obama was in Honolulu, Hawaii on August 4, 1961 (age 57). However, Trump promoted the false conspiracy theory that Obama was born in Kenya for many years. Even after Obama released his short-form and long-form birth certificate, cesspool nutters still falsely claim they're fake news, parroting points that have been repeatedly debunked.
