Trump gaffe over Mahatma Gandhi 'quote'

Republican presidential frontrunner Donald Trump's penchant for gaffes continues - his latest is misquoting Mahatma Gandhi.

"First they ignore you. Then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win," Trump wrote on his Instagram account, taking a dig at his rivals and the media for their initial failure to take his candidature seriously.

The Hill, a website that tracks politics, wrote Monday that "there's no record that Gandhi ever used the phrase, which has been widely attributed to him". It added that the quote appeared "similar to words used in a 1918 trade union address by Nicholas Klein".

In fact, according to CNN, the online newspaper Christian Science Monitor listed the quote in a report titled "Political misquotes: The 10 most famous things never actually said".

The "quote" from Gandhi came a day after Trump was trolled on Twitter and other social media for retweeting a quote by Benito Mussolini, the Italian fascist: "It is better to live one day as a lion than 100 years as a sheep."

Gawker, a news site, claimed that it had fooled Trump into retweeting the Mussolini quote. It said the quote was "originally posted by a Twitter bot that (it) had made several months ago, expressly for the purpose of goading Trump into retweeting a Benito Mussolini quote".

It said the aim was "to show that Trump's rhetoric is often indistinguishable from that of history's most vainglorious and authoritarian fascist dictators - Benito Mussolini, specifically".

Trump is leading the Republican field and seems set to score big on "super Tuesday" when 11 states choose the GOP candidate. He leads the Republican field by nearly 16 points nationwide, according to an average of polls.