Donald Trump’s “Richard Ketay” saga takes an even stranger turn

| 1:30 pm EDT October 5, 2019
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Late last night Donald Trump tweeted a quote and credited it to “Richard Ketay.” Considering that no such political pundit appears to exist in a Google search or on social media, and that the quote sounded a lot like something Trump himself would say, it raised the question of whether Trump simply made the person up. Now there’s a new twist, and a bizarre one.

The “Richard Ketay” saga took on such a life of its own last night, the name began trending atop Twitter as everyone piled on about the absurdity of Trump’s quote. But then overnight, Ashley Feinberg of Salon managed to dig up a letter to the editor that was printed in the New York Post on Thursday which included the quote, and sure enough, the letter was from Richard Ketay. Wait a minute here.

Feinberg noted that the quote was only in the print edition of the New York Post, and not on the newspaper’s website, which is why no one could find it online last night. Are we supposed to believe that Donald Trump is now rummaging through print newspapers, looking for any random praise he can find in the “letters to the editor” section? Come on, Trump can’t read.

Twitter user @TwittenItBeNice discovered that this same Richard Ketay quote appears to have been posted in relation to the far right pro-Trump conspiracy cult Q-anon, barely an hour before Donald Trump tweeted the same quote. If this is correct, it would suggest that Donald Trump and/or his social media handlers are using these lunatics as source material.