President Donald Trump has been tricked by a stealth Bernie Sanders supporter, and on his very favourite social media platform too.
President Trump appears to have spent a great deal of time over the last few days sharing posts of those expressing their preference for him over 2020 Democrat presidential campaign hopeful, Joe Biden.
Mr Biden’s candidacy has been endorsed by the International Association of Fire Fighters, and President Trump was clearly keen to show that he too can light a fire in voters’ hearts.
Unfortunately for President Trump, his enthusiastic sharing of these posts backfired when a sneaky Bernie Sanders supporter entered the frame, disguised as the proud wife of a firefighter…
The Trojan tweet retweeted by Trump appeared pretty innocuous, and in the similar vein of many of the others:
My husband a New York City firefighter for 15 years will be voting Trump 2020 all the way!!
However, there was more to the tweet than initially met the eye. No sooner had President Trump proudly retweeted these words of praise, the ‘firefighter’ threw away their mask to reveal a prankster.
The account name was changed to ‘Fuck Donald Trump’, while the display picture – formerly showing a young woman with a flower crown – was changed to a badge bearing the words ‘Bernie 2020’.
It appears this account had closely copied the account of a real Trump supporter, changing just one letter. They appear to have been trying to get Trump to retweet them since around September 2017, but this is the first time he has taken the bait.
The unnamed trickster followed up their prank with the following post:
What a great morning. In all seriousness, our president is an awful, hateful human being who wants nothing more than to keep the status quo and hatred prevalent in our country when we should be pushing forward with the rest of the world towards progress and change.
Please vote.
They continued:
For the record this account is neither a bot nor a hack, every single tweet has been legitimate.
I just am the type of committed idiot who thought over the past 2 years the President was surely dumb enough to RT literally any praising response to him.
UNILAD reached out to the anonymous social media user who provided some insight into how they pulled off the gag, and it proved to be one of the oldest tricks in the book.
The trickster told us:
Getting the idea? I’ve just seen it done across twitter before. People getting a RT and then changing their account name either to something funny or something anti the retweeter.
Trump goes on these careless retweeting sprees all the time and I figured, ‘Okay maybe I can pretend to be some random supporter and get him to retweet me’. And well, he did.
The old bait and switch!
The user wasn’t shocked POTUS was keen to strike back after discovering the International Association of Fire Fighters had publicly endorsed Joe Biden, using Trump’s hubris to their advantage online.
They explained to UNILAD:
With unions and I guess really any large groups like that of course there’ll always be individuals who don’t side with the group. So the fact that individual firefighters support him is of course unsurprising.
But I imagine for Trump this is a bit of a special case. Him being a New Yorker, he’s going to take pride in the support of the local public service workers like firemen or policemen or whoever. So I would bet it’s a bit of a shot to his ego that the union came out in support of Biden.
Prior to the prank, President Trump indeed appeared pretty peeved by the union’s endorsement of Mr Biden, tweeting:
I’ve done more for Firefighters than this dues sucking union will ever do, and I get paid ZERO!
No doubt this widely chuckled at trick will have got the president fired up further.
At the end of the day, it was all just one big giggle for the person behind the gag:
The response has been expected. People loving it, people thinking I’m a jerk, and I’m sure some bots on both sides of the aisle are tweeting at me too.
I’m sure it gave some a laugh, as it did myself and that was the ultimate goal for sure.
No matter which candidate you choose to vote for come 2020, you have to admit this is some classic trolling, expertly perpetrated.
If you have a story you want to tell send it to UNILAD via stories@unilad.co.uk
Jules studied English Literature with Creative Writing at Lancaster University before earning her masters in International Relations at Leiden University in The Netherlands (Hoi!). She then trained as a journalist through News Associates in Manchester. Jules has previously worked as a mental health blogger, copywriter and freelancer for various publications.