In a video clip from the Republican National Convention, Donald Trump said: “I will not tolerate Islamic Terrorism at any cost. The Russia Ukraine war is not a real issue. Islamic Terrorism is the real issue which is spreading like a cancer all over the world today.”
This isn’t what Mr Trump says in the video clip—or in the rest of his convention speech. We can find no evidence he ever made these comments publicly.
Posts on social media which attribute comments about Islam and Ukraine to Donald Trump and imply he made them in his Republican National Convention speech are false.
The claim appears on several platforms, including on X (formerly Twitter), where it has been shared over 8,200 times, and Facebook—together with a nearly four minute video clip of the presidential candidate making a speech. In some examples the posts include a picture of Mr Trump rather than the video.
They include a supposed quote from Mr Trump, saying: “I will not tolerate Islamic Terrorism at any cost. The Russia Ukraine war is not a real issue.
“Islamic Terrorism is the real issue which is spreading like a cancer all over the world today.” Some of these also add at the end: “~ Donald Trump [sic].”
However, nowhere in the footage of Mr Trump’s speech from the final night of the Republican National Convention on 18 July does he make these comments.
While he does mention Ukraine and Russia in the shorter clip being shared on social media, he does not say the war was “not a real issue”. He actually said: “Under President Bush, Russia invaded Georgia. Under President Obama, Russia took Crimea. Under the current administration, Russia is after all of Ukraine, under President Trump Russia took nothing.”
He mentioned Ukraine three other times in the full speech.
One of those mentions was in the shorter clip, where he also said: “Look at what’s happening with Ukraine. The cities are just bombed out. How can people live like that? Where buildings, massive buildings are falling to the ground?”
In the full speech he also mentioned the “horrible war with Russia and Ukraine”, and later stated “Russia invaded Ukraine”.
The full transcript of that speech shows he didn’t say the quotes about “Islamic Terrorism” either. He did make two references to terrorism generally. In the short clip, he said: “Viktor Orban, prime minister of Hungary, very tough man. He said, ‘I don’t want people coming into my country and blowing up our shopping centres and killing people.’”
Mr Trump also said: “And terrorists at numbers that we’ve never seen before.”
And Full Fact has not been able to find evidence that Mr Trump ever made the comments being attributed to him on social media.
But he has made many references to “Islamic terrorism” over the years, including several times on Twitter.
While in office he introduced a number of executive orders which banned people from certain majority-Muslim countries from entering the US for 90 days (although some orders were overturned, the Supreme Court upheld the travel ban in 2018, which was repealed by President Joe Biden in 2021).
It’s important to consider whether what you see online is accurate, so you can avoid sharing misleading information. We have written a number of guides on how to do this, and have fact checked a number of false or misleading claims about Mr Trump in the wake of the attempted assassination.
This article is part of our work fact checking potentially false pictures, videos and stories on Facebook. You can read more about this—and find out how to report Facebook content—here. For the purposes of that scheme, we’ve rated this claim as false because presidential candidate Donald Trump did not make the comments attributed to him in his Republican National Convention speech, and we can find no evidence of him saying them publicly elsewhere.
Full Fact fights for good, reliable information in the media, online, and in politics.
Bad information ruins lives. It promotes hate, damages people’s health, and hurts democracy. You deserve better.