Did President Donald Trump order the Federal Reserve to mint quarters without ridges, as was claimed in a social media post? No, that's not true: The proof the post offered was a counterfeit CNN.com screenshot. CNN, as of the date this was published, had reported no such order by Trump. Searches of the White House and Treasury websites showed no such order. And the post errs in saying he issued the order to the U.S. Federal Reserve, which does not mint coins. Coins are minted by the Treasury Department.
The supposed Trump order appeared in a March 17, 2025 post on X (archived here) where it was published by "1984" an account devoted to criticism of Jews, under the title "BREAKING Donald Trump orders federal reserve to begin minting quarters w/o ridges." It opened:
This change comes as a result of a signed petition from 88 jewish advocacy groups claiming that quarters w/ ridges threaten the safety of jews and fall under IHRA definition of antisemitism
This is what the post looked like at the time of publication of this fact check:
(Source: X.com screenshot taken Wed Mar 19 at 22:56:40 UTC 2025)
Coins are produced by the U.S. Mint, under the direction of the Treasury Department (archived here), not the Federal Reserve.
The CNN screenshot is a counterfeit.
Searching the CNN website itself showed no March, 2025 reports about Trump ordering the 119 ridges removed from the U.S. quarter. For instance, searching for "remove ridges" (search archived here) only returned a report about armpit shaving.
A Google search, using the "site:" search operator method to limit search results to cnn.com, looking for for stories mentioning "Trump", "quarters", "ridges" and "Federal Reserve" returned no relevant results, (archived here) indicating Google didn't recently index a CNN report about Trump de-ridging the quarter.
Similarly, a Google "site:" search operator search of the White House website for pages containing both the words "quarters" and "ridges" (archived here) returned no results.
Lead Stories manually searched the index of White House press releases and public statements on March 18, 2025 and found no official record of Trump making any orders or statements about U.S. coins the quarter or the mint or ridges.
(Source: WhiteHouse.gov screenshots taken on Tue Mar 18 at 22:56 UTC 2025)
Search terms tried by hand were: "Treasury and coin", "Federal Reserve and ridges", "National Mint" and "Federal Reserve and Quarters".In order, those searches are archived here, here, here and here. None produced any record of a President Trump order to stop production of quarter with ridges.
Other Lead Stories reports on claims about U.S. currency can be found here.
