Horror author Stephen King posted a screed on X Monday attacking President Donald Trump's personal life, and it included a claim so detached from reality that even his own followers had trouble defending it. Among the litany of complaints, King wrote that Trump "has never had a child."
Trump, of course, is the father of five children.
The post went further, claiming Trump "has been married 3 times," "ran several businesses into the ground," "never ran a home, couldn't make a bed to save his a--," and concluded that the president "has no life experience." The backlash was immediate and merciless.
Donald Trump Jr. responded on X with the kind of dry disbelief the moment deserved:
Well, this is news to me… unless he means birthed a child which would also hold true for every male ever. TDS is real and it's scary.
Libs of TikTok was more direct: "Trump literally has 5 kids. What is this sh--?"
1776 Project PAC founder Ryan Girdusky offered a gentler correction: "Um… I'm pretty sure Donald Trump had children." Conservative writer Bonchie took a different angle entirely, asking whether there's "a 25th Amendment for taking people's phones away." Conservative reporter Jerry Dunleavy went with deadpan irony, writing simply: "Donald Trump, famously childless."
King's office did not respond to a request for comment.
The story might have ended there as just another celebrity meltdown, except it turns out King didn't even write the post himself. Not really. He reshared a post from an account called "Stacy is Right," a self-described MAGA mother of three, who had posted similar comments on Saturday about Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y. The original post argued that Ocasio-Cortez "has no real-life experience" and called her "a typical deadbeat socialist."
According to Fox News, King apparently copied the structure, swapped in Trump's name, and hit send. The problem is that the criticisms, whatever their merit when aimed at AOC, make no factual sense when applied to a man who has five children, built a global real estate brand, and is now serving his second presidential term.
Matt Van Swol, a former Department of Energy nuclear scientist, noticed the lift and didn't let it slide:
You literally plagiarized an entire post…which was about AOC… and then applied it to Trump…… for whom it isn't true and doesn't make any sense. Why are you plagiarizing? I thought you were a writer?
That last line is the one that stings. Stephen King has sold hundreds of millions of books. He built an entire career on his ability to construct believable fiction. And yet, when it came time to attack a political opponent, he couldn't even bother to fabricate something plausible. He copied someone else's homework and forgot to change the answers that didn't fit.
This isn't King's first trip through the political meltdown cycle. His track record on X reads like a man competing for the most unhinged literary figure on the internet:
Comparing federal law enforcement officers to the Nazi secret police. Calling a sitting president a traitor without evidence. These aren't arguments. They're spasms. And each one follows the same pattern: provoke, get ratio'd, vanish, repeat.
The broader phenomenon is worth noting. Celebrity political commentary has become a genre unto itself, one that requires no factual accuracy, no accountability, and no consequences. King can claim the father of five children has "never had a child," and the worst thing that happens to him is a few days of mockery before the algorithm moves on. There is no correction, no retraction, no professional cost. The incentive structure rewards the outburst and ignores the cleanup.
What makes the episode revealing isn't that a celebrity said something dumb on the internet. That happens hourly. It's the nature of the error. King didn't misstate a policy position or exaggerate a statistic. He denied the existence of five human beings. Donald Trump's children are public figures. They appear on camera. They have careers, families, and social media accounts. They are not obscure.
This is what Trump Derangement Syndrome looks like in its late stages. It doesn't sharpen criticism. It dissolves it. The hatred becomes so consuming that it overwhelms basic observation. You end up calling a father of five childless and thinking you've landed a blow.
Meanwhile, President Trump is set to address the country Tuesday evening in the 2026 State of the Union. He'll be speaking to Congress about the work of his administration. King will presumably be on X, workshopping his next post.
One of them is governing. The other is plagiarizing MAGA moms and getting the facts wrong.
