Did Donald Trump say that Rome and America had been friends for thousands of years?
Executive summary
Donald Trump did not say that "Rome and America had been friends for thousands of years" in the sense that the United States and Italy have been allied since antiquity; at a joint press conference on Oct. 16, 2019 he said the two countries are "bound together by a shared cultural and political heritage dating back thousands of years, to ancient Rome" — a distinction repeatedly noted by fact-checkers [1] [2]. Social posts that recycled the line without context turned the phrasing into the claim that the U.S. and Italy have been allies since ancient Rome, a mischaracterization debunked across multiple outlets [3] [4].
1. The line, the place and the exact wording
The remark at issue was made during a White House press conference with Italian President Sergio Mattarella on Oct. 16, 2019, when Trump said, "The United States and Italy are bound together by a shared cultural and political heritage dating back thousands of years, to ancient Rome" — that wording is recorded in several primary transcripts and repeated in reporting [1] [5].
2. How a rhetorical shorthand became a viral mistranslation
Many social posts seized on the phrase "dating back thousands of years" and rephrased it as an assertion that the two nations have been allies or "friends" for millennia, a transformation that fact-checkers and archive-tracing show is not what Trump said but a viral reinterpretation amplified by images and memes [2] [6].
3. What Trump was reasonably claiming — and what he was not
Trump’s sentence tied modern U.S.–Italy ties to cultural and political inheritances that descend in part from Roman institutions and ideas; historians and commentators noted that linking Western political institutions to Roman influence is a defensible, long-standing argument [7] [1]. He did not, however, claim continuous diplomatic alliance or statehood from Roman times to today — a literal reading that would conflate cultural lineage with political alliance and contradict historical timelines [3] [8].
4. Fact-checkers and the consensus response
Multiple fact-checking organizations and news outlets concluded that the viral claim misstates the quotation and meaning: Snopes, USA Today and Yahoo documented the original phrasing and ruled that Trump did not say the U.S. and Italy have been allies since ancient Rome [1] [3] [6]. These outlets also explained how the shorthand "dating back thousands of years" was the kernel of confusion that allowed the false claim to spread [4].
5. Why the image of the interpreter helped the false narrative spread
A photograph of an Italian interpreter’s startled expression circulated alongside the miscaptioned quote and became a visual hook that encouraged readers to accept the exaggerated claim; investigative reporting and debunkers traced the image and context and showed the photo was unrelated theatrically to the false claim, yet it played a large role in virality [9] [10].
6. Bottom line: precise language matters — and was mangled
The precise, documented public record shows Trump praised a shared cultural and political heritage linked to ancient Rome, not a continuous alliance or friendship between Rome and the United States across millennia; the viral narrative that he said the U.S. and Italy "have been allies since the time of Ancient Rome" is a mischaracterization repeatedly corrected by fact-checkers and reporters [2] [1] [3].