Donald Trump’s presidential seal prank takes an even stranger turn

| 12:01 pm EDT July 28, 2019
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Not long after Donald Trump addressed high school students at Turning Point USA’s conservative summit on Tuesday, he became something of a laughingstock thanks to the Washington Post noticing that a fake presidential seal was displayed on the screen behind him. The fact that a fake seal made it on the stage with the President of the United States is embarrassing enough and raises questions as to the administration’s control over the event’s planning. But, even worse for Trump, the seal was an image that pokes fun at Trump’s obsession with pleasing Russia and playing golf.

After Palmer Report told you about this apparent prank, a member of TPUSA’s AV team was fired. But according to CNN, a “source familiar with the event” claims that rather than a prank, “the incident was just a terrible Google search mistake.” Although the mainstream media seems to be accepting this story without question, it just doesn’t add up.

The source claims the team had to scramble to find a high-quality image of the seal after supposedly being told they had to switch out the event’s branding at the last minute. Such a rushed situation seems highly implausible. It does not take that much time to find such a popular image. Also, the image was displayed alone, which means the AV team knew they simply had to find the image without having to do anything more time-consuming, such as incorporate the image into slides with text.

There are even more reasons to be dubious. The source told CNN that the AV team “had to change the branding” from “event branding” to a “presidential seal.” Yet, event branding appeared prominently during the event while the presidential seal branding appeared only briefly at the beginning. Also, the AV team apparently did find the correct presidential seal after all because it was displayed on the screen directly behind Trump. The fake seal (that someone unaffiliated with TPUSA had created following the 2016 election) appeared behind Trump and to the side—in addition to the real seal. So, when the source claimed that the person “did the search and with the pressure of the event, didn’t notice that it is a doctored seal,” this statement is quite suspicious.

Given how absurd this whole thing is, it seems strange to think that there may be some sort of coverup happening here. But this incident is about Donald Trump, whom everyone knows hates to be humiliated. So, it appears likely that to avoid risking Trump’s ire by admitting he was pranked by one of their own, TPUSA pushed a false story that it was done “with zero malicious intent.” Trump can now sleep like a baby, for that is what he is.