Did Sidney Poitier say Trump might be the GOAT?

A post on the internet quotes award-winning actor Sidney Poitier praising President Donald Trump, but the quotes are made up.

The story says that Poitier made several positive comments about the importance of having someone like Trump in the White House. Here are his alleged remarks, according to webbviners.com:

"During my lifetime, America was under different leaderships, but I have never seen someone to lead this nation with passion like Donald Trump...It’s simple, he loves his nation, he loves each one of you ... This man might be the greatest of all time, we have to give him all the support we have."

Facebook flagged this story as part of its efforts to combat false news and misinformation on Facebook's News Feed. (Read more about our partnership with Facebook.) We found no proof Poitier actually said these things.

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stated on October 26, 2024 in social media posts

An old photo shows Kamala Harris in a McDonald’s uniform.

Other websites had similar stories with the quote, but none of those checked out, either. We searched for the comments in Google and Nexis and found no evidence that Poiter made that statement.

In fact, we couldn’t find any remarks of Poitier saying anything about either political party in a credible news source.

What we do know about Poitier is that he was appointed ambassador of the Bahamas to Japan for 10 years and was awarded the 2009 Presidential Medal of Freedom by former President Barack Obama.

Yet, there is still no evidence that the actor made that statement. We rate this story Pants on Fire.