Did Sophie Cunningham and other famous people including Alice Cooper, Ice Cube and Myles Garrett say that President Donald Trump is a “tough man” and “no one has fought harder for the heart and soul of America”? No, that’s not true: There is no evidence that Cunningham and the others ever said that about Trump. The claim was an example of so-called “Viet Spam” campaigns of nearly identical made-up clickbait stories, each featuring a different famous person, created to drive traffic to web pages based overseas, often in Vietnam. The fake stories are then picked up by social media accounts that are tricked into believing they are real.
The claim appeared in a March 13, 2026, post on X account @catturd2 (archived here). It opened:
This is what the post looked like on X at the time of writing:
Image source: post by @catturd2 on X.com.
There is no evidence that Indiana Fever WNBA player Cunningham ever said that about Trump. Had the superstar athlete made such a statement, it would have been major news. Lead Stories searched Google News (archived here) and Yahoo News (archived here) and did not find any matching reports.
Posts attributing the identical quote to famous people purportedly making the statement follow the same template, but the name of the celebrity or athlete varies, as a search for the quote on Facebook shows. One example of the quote about Trump attributed to George Strait was posted on the Facebook page Country Spirit Radio (archived here), which is managed from Vietnam, according to the Meta transparency data (archived here). Lead Stories has previously debunked posts from this page. Here is a screenshot of the transparency page:
Image source: screenshot of Facebook page @countryspiritradio.
The same quote was attributed to UConn Huskies Coach Dan Hurley on the Facebook page Northeast Hoops Family (archived here), which is also managed from Vietnam, as this screenshot of the transparency page shows:
Image source: screenshot of Facebook page @NortheastHoopsFamily.
Here is the list of famous people with the quote attributed to them on Facebook as of publication date:
UConn Huskies coach Dan Hurley
Pittsburgh Penguins head coach Dan Muse
Dawn Staley, head coach of South Carolina Gamecocks women’s basketball team
Image source: Lead Stories montage of screenshots of Facebook posts falsely attributing manufactured quote to public figures including Sophie Cunningham, Alice Cooper and Myles Garrett.
The type of the claim, its copied-and-pasted language and the way it spread fit the pattern of what Lead Stories has identified as “Vietspam” — social media campaigns to generate traffic for made-for-advertising pages (archived here) that rely on shocking headlines about celebrities coming from websites pretending to be news outlets. Lead Stories has published dozens of debunks highlighting the prevalence of such schemes on Facebook.
Lead Stories published a primer on how to identify these kinds of fake posts exported from Vietnam. It’s titled “Prebunk: Beware Of Fake Fan Pages Spreading False Stories About Your Favorite Celebrities — How To Spot ‘Viet Spam'”.