Trump Did Not Claim that the Late Auto Icon Lee Iacocca Praised His Tariff Plan, Despite Viral Claims on Liberal Social Media
By Macrina Wang
What happened: Left-leaning social media users are misrepresenting a comment made by President Donald Trump during an April 2, 2025, speech announcing sweeping tariffs on nearly all U.S. trading partners, falsely claiming that Trump said his recently announced plan was praised by the Chrysler CEO and Ford President Lee Iacocca — who died in 2019.
A closer look: Liberal and anti-Trump accounts are claiming that Trump was dishonest or “senile” in claiming that the deceased Iacocca supported Trump’s plan.
One of the earliest examples of the claim identified by NewsGuard is a since-deleted Bluesky post by anti-Trump economist Adam S. Hersh that stated: “Trump says he talked to Lee Iacocca about his tariff plan. Lee Iacocca has been deceased since 2019.” The post received 2,300 likes and 760 reposts in six hours.
Anti-Trump X user @ChrisO_wiki shared a screenshot of Hersh’s Bluesky post with the caption, “Well, this is not at all reassuring.” The post received 898,100 views and 22,000 likes in one day.
Anti-Trump X user @RiverGecko stated in an X post: “Trump finds strong backing from beyond the grave for today’s tariffs from car industry legend Lee Iacocca. … Lee Iacocca died on in Los Angeles on July 2, 2019 aged 94.” The post, which included the hashtag “#TrumpSenile,” garnered 108,100 views and 420 likes in one day.
Actually: Trump did not claim that Iacocca backed the plan, a NewsGuard review of his speech found.
Instead, Trump said that “a gentleman today on television who used to work with Lee Iacocca” praised his tariff plan. Trump did not attribute the praise to Iacocca.
Trump described the unidentified man as “an older guy, real pro, really top guy with Lee Iacocca” and claimed the man said that the tariffs would transform the U.S. “not only with the cars, but on every single other item that’s built.”
Trump did not identify the man, and NewsGuard was unable to determine his identity. The White House did not respond to NewsGuard’s request for comment on the matter.
More context: Trump has previously expressed admiration for Iacocca, who as a U.S. auto executive was a strong advocate for punitive tariffs on Asian car imports.
One of Trump’s biographers, Michael D’Antonio, who wrote “Never Enough: Donald Trump and the Pursuit of Success,” told The New York Times (Trust Score: 87.5/100) in 2019 that Trump “imagined himself Iacocca’s equal as an icon of American business.”