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| - For years, a rumor has circulated online that Kurt Cobain, frontman of the grunge band Nirvana, predicted the election of U.S. President Donald Trump in an alleged quote from 1993, the year before Cobain died.
The supposed Cobain quote read:
In the end I believe my generation will surprise everyone. We already know that both political parties are playing both sides from the middle and we'll elect a true outsider when we fully mature. I wouldn't be surprised if it's not a business tycoon who can't be bought and who does what's right for the people. Someone like Donald Trump as crazy as that sounds.
(X user @l42022425)
Examples of posts (archived) including the claim have appeared on social media platforms including X (archived) and Facebook.
In short, there was no evidence the alleged Cobain quote predicting the election of a "business tycoon … like Donald Trump" was genuine. As a result, we rated it misattributed.
As we found when we first looked into the claim in 2016, the rumor appeared to have originated that July from a post on a pro-Trump Facebook page named "Trump Train."
That post was no longer available at the time of this writing, but a reporter for AFP captured a screenshot of it for a 2018 fact check.
The post consisted of a meme containing the quote that appears above. In both the meme and the text of the post, the author misspelled Cobain's first name as "Curt."
Also in 2018, Cobain's former manager Danny Goldberg wrote an essay for The Nation refuting the idea that Cobain would have called for a "business tycoon" as president. Goldberg based his rebuttal on his personal knowledge of Cobain, as well as several quotes about politics Cobain gave to reporters in the early 1990s.
For example, Goldberg said that in 1992, Cobain told the Argentinian reporter Sergio Marchi that he wouldn't vote for Ross Perot, a wealthy businessman who was then running for president as an independent. According to Goldberg, Cobain said of Perot, "The guy sucks. He's rich; I don't trust him as president."
A transcript of Marchi's article — in the original Spanish — appeared on the fan website liveNIRVANA. We have not yet been able to secure a copy of the original publication in order to confirm the transcript's accuracy.
We've looked into other rumors about Cobain in the past, such as the claim that he said anyone offended by the nude baby on the cover of Nirvana's album "Nevermind" was a "closet pedophile."
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