Did a leaked Fox News memo say interviewers used Vicks VapoRub to mask Donald Trump's purportedly offensive odor? No, that's not true: The account on X that wrote about the memo describes its content as satire and comedy. No credible news sources reported on such a leaked memo. The document does not exist.
The claim originated from a post (archived here) made to X on October 20, 2024. It said:
BREAKING: A leaked memo from Fox News reveals that the network's interviewers regularly use Vicks VapoRub when interviewing Donald Trump because he smells like, as one Fox producer called it, 'rotten roast beef.'
This is what the post looked like at the time of writing:
(Source: X screenshot taken on Tue Oct 22 14:31:50 2024 UTC)
In its bio, the account (archived here) that originated the claim describes its content as being comedy and satire:
Halfway true comedy and satire by @DashMacIntyre. I don't report the facts, I improve them.
The post on X does not offer evidence to back up its claim about a leaked Fox memo, and if it were true, it would not have gone unnoticed. A search of Google News' thousands of news sites (archived here) did not bring up any credible news reports. We also searched for key phrases from the claim on all of Google (archived here), but the search only brought up the satire account's post and unrelated articles.
Additional Lead Stories fact checks concerning claims about Donald Trump can be found here; claims concerning the 2024 U.S. presidential election are here.
