Lara Trump’s Abraham Lincoln ‘quote’ was a fake

You can fool some of the people all of the time.

Lara Trump’s Republican convention speech hinged on a “quote” from Abraham Lincoln that went over well with her audience Wednesday night. Trouble is, Honest Abe apparently never said the words the president’s daughter-in-law attributed to him.

During her nearly eight minute endorsement of President Trump’s reelection, the 37-year-old wife of Trump Organization Vice President Eric Trump repeated a phrase often credited to the 16th president on the internet, though there’s no evidence it’s real.

“Abraham Lincoln once famously said ’America will never be destroyed from the outside,’” Trump erroneously stated four minutes into her monologue. “If we falter and lose our freedoms, it will be because we destroyed ourselves.”

Trump claimed that while those words were spoken by Lincoln more than 150 years ago, never have they been more relevant than they are today. That isn’t to say the quote is accurate.

The New York Times pointed out that watered-down verbiage resembles something Lincoln said during a speech gave in 1838, where he spoke to the dangers of internal division.

“I answer, if it ever reach us, it must spring up amongst us,” goes Lincoln’s quote. “It cannot come from abroad. If destruction be our lot, we must ourselves be its author and finisher. As a nation of freemen, we must live through all time, or die by suicide.”

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Fact-checking sites Snopes and PolitiFact also concluded Trumps’ quote is not real.

Trump’s speech also included a quote from her 7th grade English teacher, Mrs. B — which if true — was never more relevant than it was Wednesday.

“Believe none of what you hear, half of what you read and only what you’re there to witness firsthand,” her junior high teacher allegedly said.

Before becoming president, The Donald also shared the made-up Lincoln quote on Twitter, where it was pointed out the beloved former president didn’t say those words.

Wrongly attributed quotes, some accidental and others perhaps not, are so frequent on the internet that one popular meme uses a photo of Lincoln to remind people to fact-check.

“Don’t believe everything you read on the internet just because there’s a picture with a quote next to it,” reads one commonly seen graphic that uses a photo of Lincoln and attributes the quote to the president who died well over a century before the Internet existed.

President Trump also likes to remind voters of his connection to Lincoln, to whom he has loosely compared himself. He has claimed on several occasions that it’s a little known fact the man on the penny was a Republican.

“Like, people don’t remember, nobody ever heard of it until I came along, nobody remembered it for a long time, or they didn’t use it at least, I use it all the time: Abraham Lincoln was a Republican,” the president said during a speech last month. “You know you say that and people say, ‘I didn’t know that,’ but he was Republican, so we’re doing a great job.”

The president has also claimed on multiple occasions that he has done more for African Americans than any other president, while sometimes conceding Lincoln, who ended slavery, might be the only head of state who can give him a run for his money.

That ignores the fact that Lyndon Johnson signed the Civil Right Act of 1964 and, as The Washington Post’s David Swerdlick noted in July, black unemployment has doubled since the Trump administration began.

Forbes reports that black unemployment did drop under presidents Obama and Trump, but skyrocketed in 2020 when the pandemic struck and the economy hit a wall.

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The RNC convention wrapped-up Thursday night with the president delivering his pitch for another term in office. The 74-year-old incumbent considered accepting his party’s nomination from Gettysburg, Pa., where Lincoln delivered one of the most powerful speeches the nation has known. Trump opted instead to stay home and hold a rally at the White House.