Fact Check: Did Donald Trump call teachers ‘very ugly’ in viral Truth Social post?

WASHINGTON, DC: An alleged Truth Social post from Donald Trump started making the rounds earlier this month, with the President supposedly ranting about the Department of Education.

The viral screenshot claimed Trump had slammed the DOED as one of the “most terrible organizations on Earth," while also bizarrely complaining about sporks in school cafeterias, peanut bans, and "DEWHY" policies.

But the line that really sparked outrage was one where Trump allegedly referred to teachers as "very ugly" while criticizing money spent on their training.

Trump’s critics immediately pounced at the opportunity and mocked him relentlessly—but there was just one problem. Turns out the entire post was fake.

Donald Trump ripped on social media over controversial post

The viral screenshot of the supposed Truth Social rant by Donald Trump quickly made its way across X (formerly Twitter), Facebook, and TikTok. The post included a timestamp (12:36 am) and even showed 7,700 likes and 2,200 "ReTruths," which made it seem authentic.

The post read, "The Department of Education, as we will all soon find out, is one of the terrible organizations on Earth, with millions wasted over many years developing a hybrid of the fork and spoon in our cafeterias (which no one likes). Millions spent teaching our educators, many of which are very ugly, how to read before they are allowed to teach our children. Tens of Millions, even Billions, reinforcing flawed DEI - or DEWHY as we call it now policies of extreme radicals to indoctrinate our youth by enforcing peanut bans to accommodate a very small group (very LOUD) who don't like the beautiful nut. This horrible 'department' must be stopped NOW!"

Critics of Trump took to social media to slam the President over his alleged remarks.

"Hey Teachers, the President says you ugly! Don’t worry, Donald Trump, you’re an ugly m-f-er, too," one user posted on X.

"This would be funny if these were only the words of a crazy neighbor, but this is the current resident of 1600 Pennsylvania Ave NW and the supposed leader of the free world attempting to dismantle oversight of our system of public education," another offered.

"Obviously they failed to teach him to read, spell, proper use of capitals and punctuation, or construct a grammatical sentence. However with his apparent learning difficulties and intellectual impairment not sure it is the fault of the teachers!" read a comment.

"Whoa, he just slipped into full-on mildly Freudian stream-of-consciousness dementia in that last bit about the peanuts," someone else chimed in.

"JC on a wooden stick. Whenever you're sure that he's hit the bottom, the floor drops right out. He's not just crazy, he's actually insane," another remarked.

Fact Check: It never happened

The fact-checkers at Snopes and other outlets quickly got to work, digging through Donald Trump’s feed on Truth Social. They found that a thorough review of the President's posts from February 7 to February 8, 2025, showed no sign of the message.

And that wasn’t the only red flag. A Google search also revealed that the post had never been indexed, meaning that no reputable news outlet had reported on it. Plus, every single version of the viral screenshot had identical engagement numbers (likes and “ReTruths”), which is extremely rare for real posts.

This is because when an actual post goes viral, people in different time zones take screenshots at different times, meaning the numbers change in each screenshot. But in this case, every single version of the fake post had the same numbers. That was a huge giveaway that it was completely fabricated.

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