Fact-checkers examined whether Trump said that a government shutdown is a sign of weakness for a U.S. president
In 2013, a quote allegedly said by Donald Trump spread on social media: “A government shutdown is the result of a lack of presidential leadership. Problems start at the top, and they have to be solved at the top. A shutdown means the president is weak”. This statement regained popularity during the U.S. government shutdown in 2025, when internet users recalled that Trump – who was president at the time – had supposedly said this himself. However, this claim is not entirely accurate. Snopes reported on this.
As fact-checkers found, only the second part of the quote – “Problems start at the top, and they have to be solved at the top” – genuinely belongs to Trump. He said it during an appearance on the TV program Fox & Friends on September 30, 2013, when Barack Obama was president and the country was preparing for a possible government shutdown. At the time, Trump argued that it was the president’s responsibility to overcome political crises and demonstrate leadership. The rest of the phrases circulating on social media were never spoken by him, although their general meaning aligns with his position during that period.
Snopes analyzed archives from Bing, Google, Yahoo, and DuckDuckGo, as well as posts on Facebook, X (formerly Twitter), Instagram, and Threads, but found no evidence that Trump ever literally said phrases about a “weak president” or a “lack of leadership”. The earliest appearances of these words date back only to 2018, during another government shutdown that occurred while Trump himself was president. This suggests that the quote was assembled from his real statements and later spread as a generalized version of his views.
Fact-checkers also note that back in 2011, during an appearance on the Today show, Trump said that in the event of a shutdown, “the blame falls on the president, because he is the one who has to bring everyone together and pass a budget”. In his Twitter posts from the same period, he repeatedly criticized Barack Obama, calling him “weak” and holding him responsible for political conflicts in Washington.