Fact Check: We Looked into the Alleged Trump Quote, 'Religion Is Such a Great thing There's Something to Be Good About'
Claim:
Former U.S. President Donald Trump said, "Religion is such a great thing it's so it keeps you know there's something to be good about you want to be good; you wanna it's so important."
Rating:
Context:
While the attribution is correct, the quote, which included most of Trump's filler words, was relayed in social media posts without punctuation and with slight modifications to make it look more garbled than it really was. Trump was speaking in an interview with Fox News, answering a question about his relationship to God.
In June 2024, a quote attributed to former U.S. President and presidential candidate Donald Trump began to circulate:
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"Religion is such a great thing it's so it keeps you know there's something to be good about you want to be good; you wanna it's so important I don't know if it's explained right I don't know if I'm explaining it right you know you want to be good you want to go to heaven OK so you want to go to heaven so if we don't have heaven OK you almost say what's what's the reason why do I have to be good what difference does it make"
Various versions of the same quote appeared on social media, including on Reddit, X, or Threads. One Snopes reader contacted us asking if the quote had been generated by artificial intelligence.
We ran the quote, as is, through several AI-generated-text detectors, including Quillbot, Copyleaks, ZeroGPT, Merlin and GPTZero, all of which confirmed this was human text.
A search for the exact quote in Google revealed that it was taken from a 90-minute interview Trump gave Fox News in early June 2024, "48 hours after his conviction" in the New York State Court of Appeals. The full interview was published on YouTube, and the former president was answering a question asked by Fox News Anchor Rachel Campos-Duffy on behalf of Fox News viewer "Sharon from Alabama." The exchange occurs at 1 hour, 11 minutes and 17 seconds:
We pulled the full quote, punctuated and edited for clarity, from a transcript posted online by speech-to-text service Rev:
Campos-Duffy: This is Sharon from Alabama, and I think her question actually ties into what we were just talking about. How do you do this? And I know that you've said before that you've been sustained by the prayers of lots of Americans. I've seen pictures of people praying over you.
Trump: It's incredible actually.
Campos-Duffy : Her question is, she says, "You've been faced with so much adversity and persecution for years. What's your relationship with God and how do you pray?" That's Sharon from Alabama.
Trump: Okay, so I think it's good. I do very well with the evangelicals. I love the evangelicals. And I have more people saying they pray for me. I can't even believe it. And they are so committed and they're so believing. They say, "Sir, you're going to be okay. I pray for you every night." I can't say everybody, but almost everybody that sees me, they say it. It's such a beautiful thing. You know what's a beautiful thing too? When you look at all of this bad stuff going on, they have nothing to look up to. They have no God. They have no anything. They kill people. They beat people. They push people into subways. There's just nothing there. Religion is such a great thing. There's something to be good about. You want to be good. It's so important. And I don't know if it's explained right. I don't know if I'm explaining it right during now, but when you have something like that, you want to be good. You want to go to heaven. You want to go to heaven. If you don't have heaven, you almost say, "What's the reason? Why do I have to be good? Let's not be good. What difference does it make?"
The quote as it was relayed on social media lacked punctuation and included most of the filler words, defined as "words, sounds, or phrases people use to 'fill in' empty spaces in communication. In speech, they usually indicate the speaker is thinking about what to say next, while in writing they're often clichés or padding." This presentation made the quote appear less coherent than it was in context.
Sources:
Fox News. EXCLUSIVE Full Interview with Former President Donald Trump! | Will Cain Show. 2024. YouTube, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HVKRNcQUbRY.
Allen, Hugh. 'Donald Trump Will Cain Fox Interview'. Rev, https://www.rev.com/blog/transcripts/donald-trump-interview-on-the-will-cain-show. Accessed 20 June 2024.
