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Trump reignites false claim about Fidel Castro being father of Canada's PM Justin Trudeau

A man speaks behind a podium with a sign.
Sue Ogrocki
/
AP
Republican presidential candidate, former President Donald Trump speaks during a campaign rally, Saturday, July 29, 2023, in Erie, Pa.

A newly released photobook by former President Donald Trump includes a longtime debunked rumor that Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s father is the late Cuban dictator Fidel Castro.

In the book, “Save America,” released last Tuesday, Trump writes that Trudeau’s mother was “somehow associated” with Castro. He offers no evidence to support his claim.

“A lot of people say that Justin is his son,” Trump writes in the book. “He says that he isn’t, but how the hell would he know!”

Two Canadian lawmakers, Lloyd Axworthy and Allan Rock, slammed Trump this week for the bogus claim, calling it “profoundly offensive” and a blatant attempt to politically undermine Trudeau.

“We just thought it’s about time Canadians showed some outrage about this attempt to interfere into our affairs,” Axworthy, Canada’s former top diplomat and Liberal Party leader, told POLITICO.

“Part of the Trump or the autocratic playbook is to get people’s confidence undermined, and it’s clear coming out in a book like that, it would be picked up by all kinds of enablers.”

In 2018, the Associated Press reported as false stories claiming Castro being Trudeau’s father.

The AP reported that “the Canadian government denied it, Cuba has never claimed it and Trudeau’s parents never visited Cuba until several years after Justin Trudeau was born.”

The story circulated on the internet following the Feb. 1, 2018, suicide of Castro’s oldest son, Fidelito, who supposedly left a suicide note naming Trudeau as his half-brother. Neither state media nor independent reporters covering the death reported the existence of a suicide note.

A theory that Castro was Trudeau’s father was also shared widely on social media after Castro’s death in 2016, when Trudeau caused an uproar over remarks praising the late Cuban leader, the AP reported.

Justin Trudeau was born on Dec. 25, 1971, to the late Canadian Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau and his wife, Margaret.

Trudeau was born a little more than nine months after the marriage of his parents and more than four years before Margaret made a much-publicized first trip to Cuba and met Fidel Castro.

Margaret was 22 when she married the 51-year-old prime minister and was the subject of intense media scrutiny. Experts say it would have been impossible for an earlier visit to Cuba to go unnoticed.

The Associated Press contributed to this story.

 

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