Video Fact Check Results

The statement is mostly accurate on family-background facts, but its concluding claim is rhetorical and not established by the facts given.

• “Donald Trump is the son of an immigrant” — Accurate.
  His mother, Mary Anne MacLeod Trump, was born in Tong, on the Isle of Lewis in Scotland, and immigrated to the United States in 1930. His father, Fred Trump, was born in New York to German immigrants.

• “[He is] the grandson of an immigrant” — Accurate, though incomplete.
  His paternal grandfather, Friedrich Trump, was born in Kallstadt, Germany, and immigrated to the United States in 1885. His maternal grandparents were also born in Scotland. Trump therefore has multiple immigrant grandparents, not merely one.

• “[He is] married to an immigrant” — Technically accurate, but potentially ambiguous.
  Trump’s current wife, Melania Trump, was born in what was then Yugoslavia, now Slovenia, and immigrated to the United States. She became a U.S. citizen in 2006.

• “Two of his three wives were immigrants” — Accurate under the ordinary meaning of “immigrant.”
  Ivana Trump was born in what was then Czechoslovakia and moved to Canada before later settling in the United States. Melania Trump was born in Slovenia and moved to the United States. Marla Maples, Trump’s second wife, was born in Georgia, United States.
  A qualification is that “immigrant” can be defined in different ways, and Ivana’s immigration history involved Canada before the United States. Nevertheless, describing both Ivana and Melania as immigrants to the United States is reasonable.

• “Proving yet again that immigrants will do the jobs that even Americans are not willing to do” — Unsupported and misleading.
  The marriages of two immigrants to Donald Trump do not prove a general proposition about immigrants and labor markets. The statement also does not identify what “jobs” are being discussed. Ivana Trump worked as a model, businessperson, and author; Melania Trump worked as a model and later as a public figure and first lady. Those facts do not demonstrate that they performed jobs Americans were unwilling to do.

There is also a rhetorical issue: the phrase “even Americans” treats immigrants and Americans as mutually exclusive categories, although immigrants who become naturalized citizens are Americans as well. Overall, the family-history claims are substantially correct, while the final inference is an unsupported generalization rather than a fact established by the preceding information.