As the saying goes, when it comes to Trump, there’s a tweet for everything, so there just had to be a tweet somehow befitting the drop in the Dow Jones Industrial Average Monday. This was that tweet:
There's *always* a tweet pic.twitter.com/dmrmzoRwP1
— Shaun Usher (@ShaunUsher) February 5, 2018
The only thing is … that tweet is fake.
Sweet mother of god. Not for one second did I think people would believe that to be genuine.
— Shaun Usher (@ShaunUsher) February 5, 2018
This tweet is going Gorilla Channel. https://t.co/HvYv7Q2eUX
— Dave Sund (@davesund) February 6, 2018
Still, it was retweeted at least 13,000 times by Twitter luminaries ranging from the executive editor of Bloomberg View to Rosie O’Donnell.
What amazes me the most about the fake Trump “Dow Joans” tweet is the number of people in the media who uncritically assumed it was real without doing even the most rudimentary of fact checking. pic.twitter.com/OGvEmXYzqK
— Alex VanNess (@thealexvanness) February 5, 2018
It's a fake tweet. https://t.co/SDgDLF1irm
— Instapundit.com (@instapundit) February 6, 2018
Senior advisor to Hillary Clinton Philippe Reines played it cool though; even though he’d retweeted the fake tweet, he didn’t delete it, but instead played up how convincing of a fake it was.
His questionable quotation mark usage goes way back. pic.twitter.com/viSLGDdVnr
— Philippe Reines (@PhilippeReines) February 5, 2018
False alarm, put “away” the cannon helmet. He wasn’t talking about the Dow Jones. So we have to “wait” for the Dow JOANS to drop 1,000.
And yes, it’s amazing “how” there’s a Tweet for every occasion. It’s like he did nothing else while his “businesses” went bankrupt six times.
— Philippe Reines (@PhilippeReines) February 5, 2018
So how did Reines fall for it?
Every word of it was believable. Every word. Every errant quotation mark. Every misspelling. Every hypocrisy. Every misconception about astrophysics. Every everything.
Someone deserves creativity points.
@shaunuaher is it you? https://t.co/P1rvbpLbcP
— Philippe Reines (@PhilippeReines) February 5, 2018
Someone deserves creativity points, and that would be Reines for trying to spin falling for a fake tweet. Did we mention how many journalists fell for this thing too?
I kid you not, Snopes have just been in touch.
— Shaun Usher (@ShaunUsher) February 5, 2018
Many people asking why I haven't taken it down. Literally within minutes of me posting it, it had legs. It was everywhere within about 10mins. I had lost control of it in an instant. Deleting mine–its place of birth–felt wrong & maybe more dangerous?
— Shaun Usher (@ShaunUsher) February 5, 2018
Email from the Washington Post. Guys, I've made it.
— Shaun Usher (@ShaunUsher) February 5, 2018
I told you it was fake. https://t.co/eR8JDXqAER
— Shaun Usher (@ShaunUsher) February 5, 2018
We bet Alan Grayson would have caught this in a second if he had kept that gig with Politifact.
Related:
DESPERATE Ana Navarro tweets/deletes fake ‘Lebron hates Trump’ pic (Brian Stelter triggered!)