Fact check: is the Trump campaign hiring actors on Craigslist to appear at his Tulsa rally?
Over the past several days, a popular post has been going around on social media which asserts that Donald Trump is hiring minority actors and actresses on Craigslist to appear at his upcoming rally in Tulsa, Oklahoma. We keep getting asked if it’s true, so here’s our fact check.
This ad did in fact appear on Craigslist, and it claims to be coming from the Trump 2020 campaign:
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However, based on the details in the ad, the whole thing immediately seems suspect. For instance, why would a campaign be asking for headshots and (in particular) resumes, when the job merely requires standing in a spot and holding up a sign? Moreover, the Trump campaign isn’t in any position to offer “community service” in lieu of payment. Nor would the Trump campaign need to take such an obvious and risky route for finding stand-ins at the rally, when it could accomplish the same thing through closed-door channels.
In any case, the ad has now been flagged for removal, meaning it violates Craigslist terms of service. This strongly suggests that the ad was posted by someone pretending to be the Trump campaign. In other words, the ad is very probably not real. The Trump campaign has done a number of disreputable things, but this doesn’t appear to be one of them.
