Did President Trump say that "hundreds" of state governors are calling him? No, that is false. This is a claim making the rounds on social media that takes the words of the president out of context. And it appears designed to make the president look ignorant of the fact there are only 50 states.
The claim appeared in a post by Mike Zimmer (archived here) published on Facebook on April 19, 2020, under the title "Trump said that HUNDREDS of governors are calling him." It opened:
"Trump said that 'HUNDREDS of Governors are calling him.' We only have 50. Think about that. Take all the time you need."
This is what the post looked like on Facebook at the time of writing:
The president has made many references to state governors, including during the COVID-19 pandemic. But a review of comments by the president shows this statement was not uttered by Trump.
Trump did, however, make remarks about state governors in an April 13, 2020, White House press briefing, in which he claimed that he has received hundreds of complimentary comments from governors, including New York's Andrew Cuomo. Whether Trump did in fact receive hundreds of calls from governors has not been verified by Lead Stories.
Here is a video of the news conference, with the comments made at the 1:38:25 mark:
And here is a transcript of the remarks:
So, we could give you hundreds of clips like that from governors -- including Democratic, or 'Democrat,' as I call them, governors, which is actually the correct term. We could give you hundreds of clips just like that. We have them. We didn't want this to go on too long, but I just want to say it's -- you know, it's very sad when people write false stories like, in that case, I guess it was gotten mostly from the New York Times, which is a highly -- I mean, if you had libel laws, they would have been out of business even before they'll end up going out of business. So, it's too bad. But we could have given you -- you saw the statements. We have hundreds of statements. Hundreds of statements, including from Democrats and Democrat governors."
A check of FactBase, where Trump's videos, speeches and tweets are logged, does not bring up any instance of Trump speaking the words, "Hundreds of governors are calling me." Nor does a check of the Trump Twitter Archive pull up those words.
The president maintained a video log (vlog) from 2011-2014. He deleted most of it prior to 2015, when his campaign really kicked off for the White House. However, FactBase has retrieved and archived 105 of the 108 vlogs -- or almost three hours of video.
