President Trump on Wednesday appeared to cast doubt on his own commerce secretary’s statement a day before that the 2020 Census would not include a question on US citizenship — calling the reports ”FAKE!”

“The News Reports about the Department of Commerce dropping its quest to put the Citizenship Question on the Census is incorrect or, to state it differently, FAKE! We are absolutely moving forward, as we must, because of the importance of the answer to this question,” the commander-in-chief tweeted.

A day earlier, commerce chief Wilbur Ross said the opposite.

“The Census Bureau has started the process of printing the decennial questionnaires without the question,” Ross, 81, said in a statement.

“My focus, and that of the Bureau and the entire Department, is to conduct a complete and accurate census.”

Justice Department spokeswoman Kelly Laco also confirmed Tuesday there would be “no citizenship question on 2020 census.”

It was unclear whether the president meant that the administration would continue to fight to have the controversial question — which critics charge would result in an undercount of Latinos and other minorities — included next year or in some future census.

Trump spokeswoman Stephanie Grisham did not immediately respond to a request for clarification from The Post.

Days after the Supreme Court halted the addition of the citizenship question, the Census Bureau was expected to start printing the questionnaire without the query.

Administration lawyers notified parties in lawsuits challenging the question that the printing of the hundreds of millions of documents for the 2020 counts would begin, said Kristen Clarke, executive director of the National Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law.

Trump had said after the high court’s decision last week that he would ask his attorneys about possibly delaying next spring’s decennial census until the Supreme Court could revisit the matter, raising questions about whether printing of the census materials would start as planned this month.

For months, the Trump administration had argued that the courts needed to decide quickly whether the citizenship question could be added because of the deadline for starting printing materials this week.

On Twitter Tuesday night, Trump wrote that the Supreme Court ruling marked a “very sad time for America.” He also said he had asked the Commerce and Justice departments “to do whatever is necessary to bring this most vital of questions, and this very important case, to a successful conclusion.”

Team Trump had said the question was being added to aid in enforcement of the Voting Rights Act, which protects minority voters’ access to the ballot box.

But in the Supreme Court’s decision, Chief Justice John Roberts joined the court’s four more liberal members in saying the administration’s current justification for the question “seems to have been contrived.”

New York’s attorney general praised the decision to abandon the citizenship question.

“While the Trump Administration may have attempted to politicize the census and punish cities and states across the nation, justice prevailed, and the census will continue to remain a tool for obtaining an accurate count of our population,” said AG Letitia James.

With AP