Does a viral clip show authentic archival footage of U.S. President Ronald Reagan telling a story about his conversation with a child who wanted to solve homelessness? No, that's not true: Two AI detectors found that the clip utilized AI generated sound. The video recycled the recording of Reagan's last presidential address from the Oval Office, but in reality, he did not bring up the topic of homelessness at all in that speech.
The claim appeared in a video (archived here) published on TikTok on March 27, 2025, under the caption:
#ronaldreagan #president #democrat #republican #fyp
The video appeared to portray U.S. President Ronald Reagan saying the following:
I recently asked my friend's little girl what she wanted to be when she grows up. She said she wanted to be the President of the United States. Both of her parents, liberal Democrats, were standing there. So I asked her, 'If you were president, what would be the first thing you would do?' 'Well', she replied, 'I'd give food and houses to all the homeless people'. Her parents beamed. 'Wow, what a worthy goal', I told her. 'But you don't have to wait until your president to do that. You see, you can come over to my house right now, and you can mow the lawn, pull weeds and sweep my driveway, and I'll pay you $50. Then I'll take you over to the grocery store where that homeless guy hangs out, and you can give him the $50 to use toward food and a new house'. She thought that over for a few seconds, then she looked me straight in the eye and asked, 'Why doesn't the homeless guy come over and do the work and you can just pay him the $50?' I said, 'Welcome to the Republican Party'. Her parents are still not speaking to me.
This is what the post looked like on TikTok at the time of writing:
(Source: TikTok screenshot taken on Tue Apr 1 18:42:38 2025 UTC)
Two AI detectors -- DeepFake-o-Meter (archived here) and Hiya in the InVid verification plugin (archived here) -- showed that the audio was likely not authentic:
(Source: DeepFake-o-Meter screenshot taken on Tue Apr 1 18:19:34 2025 UTC)
(Source: InVid screenshot taken on Tue Apr 1 18:11:50 2025 UTC)
A search for the keywords seen here across C-SPAN (archived here), a nonprofit TV network televising political proceedings in the U.S. that was created two years before Reagan's presidency, produced no confirmation that he said on air what was attributed to him.
The post on TikTok appeared to have reused the footage of Reagan's last address from the Oval Office (archived here) that captures him wearing the same tie and displays the same window in the background:
(Source: C-Span screenshot taken on Tue Apr 1 19:42:16 2025 UTC)
The transcript of his 1989 farewell address (archived here) shows that he did not say anything about homeless people in that speech:
(Source: Reagan Library screenshot taken on Tue Apr 1 19:48:27 2025 UTC)
The content of the purported Reagan speech appears to have originated from a meme that had been online for at least 16 years (archived here). Its earliest versions did not attribute the quote to him.
A search for the keywords from the claim led to news reports from 2014 about Reagan's letter to a child (archived here) being auctioned at the time. The item's description read:
In 1986, a young girl named Lisa committed to doing a walk-a-thon to raise money for the homeless, something that was important to her. In doing so, she wrote the most unlikely of potential supporters, the President of the United States at the time, Ronald Reagan. ...
Autograph letter signed as president, on White House letterhead, August 26, 1986, to Lisa, whose last name we withhold to respect her privacy. 'Dear Lisa, I am very proud to sponsor you in the walkathon. Thank you for asking. I know you'll walk the seven miles and the enclosed is to help the cause you are serving. God bless you. Ronald Reagan.'
The item's description noted that the letter arrived with a check for $50 from Reagan's personal account.
On the policy level, the story was more complicated.
In the January 1984 interview aired by ABC (archived here), Reagan said:
... one problem that we've had, even in the best of times, and that is the people who are sleeping on the grates, the homeless who are homeless, you might say, by choice.
According to the 2015 review of Reagan's policies concerning homeless populations (archived here), his administration, which practiced significant cuts to government social programs, generally did not see homelessness as a federal issue, suggesting that it should be solved by states and local initiatives instead. But in 1987, Reagan reluctantly signed the Stewart B. McKinney Homeless Assistance Act extending federal aid to homeless populations.
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Other Lead Stories fact checks mentioning Ronald Reagan can be found here.
