We were alerted to the meme by a reader, A. Douglas Thomas of Freeport, N.Y., among others, who saw it in his Facebook feed, along with a message from someone who said, “I just fact-checked this. Google Donald Trump, People magazine and 1998. This is an actual quote by Trump.”
We’ll save you the effort. It is not an actual quote by Trump.
We scoured the Peoplemagazine archives and found nothing like this quote in 1998 or any other year.
And a public relations representative with People told us that the magazine couldn’t find anything like that quote in its archives, either. People‘s Julie Farin said in an email: “Peoplelooked into this exhaustively when it first surfaced back in Oct. We combed through every Trump story in our archive. We couldn’t find anything remotely like this quote –and no interview at all in 1998.”
In 1998, Trump was cited frequently in the pages of People, but at the time, most of the stories were about Trump’s pending divorce from Marla Maples and appearances at various social and entertainment events.
https://eu.rgj.com/story/news/2015/12/10/fact-check-did-trump-say-98-republicans-dumb/77099822/