Did actor Bill Murray endorse Donald Trump for president in October 2024, calling him "such a different character"? No, that's not true: The quote attributed to Murray is from an interview he gave in 2016 when he was discussing the novelty of Trump becoming president. There are no actual news reports that Murray endorsed Trump in October 2024 for president.
The claim appeared in a post (archived here) on X, formerly known as Twitter, on October 3, 2024. It began:
🚨BREAKING: Hollywood legend Bill Murray endorses Donald Trump.
'He's just such a different character than anyone that's ever been a President of the United States.'
This is what the post looked like on X at the time of writing:
(Source: X screenshot taken on Fri Oct 4 at 20:05:10 2024 UTC)
The "breaking" claim in the tweet is misleading. Murray did not say this about Trump in October 2024. The quote is from an interview he did with "Tracks," a multilanguage TV show, which posted the footage on its Facebook page (archived here) on November 10, 2016, shortly after Trump was elected. On the post there are two sentences, one in German and one in French, that say "What does Bill Murray think of the election result?" with an American flag emoji.
The full quote from Murray in the video is:
I don't think anyone saw this one coming. It's gonna be that this is really turning it upside down and we're gonna see if the process works, you know, if democracy really works because, he's just such a different character than anyone that's ever been a president of the United States, I think.
Murray continued:
And the people that have the jobs of passing laws and really looking out for the country are actually going to have to answer. I think this is what this vote means is that the country is dissatisfied with the way that Washington has worked for the last couple of decades, you know? They're lazy and they're about inhibiting the other side. They're not about working together at all and it's sort of become such a national disgrace, a quiet national disgrace, and now all of a sudden the people have spoken about it. So, I think it's probably a good thing whether or not whether or not the legislature reacts or not, we'll find out ... We've never been here before. It's really kind of exciting because we're gonna see what we're made of.
In January 2017, an artist posted about the interview on his Facebook page (archived here) with a link to a video (archived here) that is private, as of the date of this fact check's publication The artist stated that his illustrations of Murray were used in the Tracks interview.
Using keywords from the quote, Lead Stories searched on Google News (archived here) for reports about Bill Murray endorsing Donald Trump for president in 2024 and found nothing. We then searched more broadly on Google (archived here) for any information about Murray endorsing Trump. The results only showed a repetition of the story on social media sites. We found no actual news reports that would confirm that Murray endorsed Trump.
Lead Stories contacted Bill Murray's representative and will update the fact check if a response is received.
Other Lead Stories fact checks about claims concerning Donald Trump can be found here. Additional fact checks about claims concerning the 2024 U.S. presidential election can be read here.
