FACT CHECK: Did Henry Kissinger Declare Trump ‘The One True Leader In World Affairs’?

Brad Sylvester | Fact Check Editor

A viral Facebook post claims former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger said, among other favorable statements, that President Donald Trump “is the one true leader in world affairs and he is forcing policy changes that put America first.”

Verdict: False

While the post features two legitimate Kissinger quotes, it includes several others that there are no records of him ever saying. A spokesman for Kissinger confirmed that the three dubious quotes are “entirely fictitious.”

Fact Check:

Only two of the quotes attributed to Kissinger in the post, which features a long block of text and several dubious quotes, appear to be genuine. They come from a December 2016 “Face The Nation” interview in which Kissinger discussed the foreign policy implication of Trump’s presidency.

“Donald Trump is a phenomenon that foreign countries haven’t seen,” Kissinger said in the interview – and the post accurately quotes. (RELATED: Did Henry Kissinger Say ‘Forcible Vaccination’ Would Lead To ‘Extermination Services’?)

It also more or less accurately quotes the former secretary of state as saying, “One, their perception that the previous president or the outgoing president basically withdrew America from international politics, so that they had to make their own assessment of their necessities and, secondly, that here is a new president who is asking a lot of unfamiliar questions.”

But the other three quotes about “eight years of tyranny,” Trump being “the one true leader” and there being “not a single thing wrong with him” do not appear anywhere in that interview transcript or elsewhere. Jessica LePorin, a spokesperson for Kissinger, confirmed in an email to the Daily Caller News Foundation that those quotes were “entirely fictitious.”

Kissinger has met with Trump a number of times to discuss foreign policy and spoken publicly about the president on occasion, according to media reports.

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Brad Sylvester

Fact Check Editor
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