Donald Trump caught retweeting bizarre fake Twitter parody account

| 10:00 pm EST December 23, 2019
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Last night Palmer Report asked what was going on with Donald Trump’s Twitter account. Ever since he took off for his Florida vacation, he’s almost stopped posting tweets altogether, and his dozens of retweets per day have dried up entirely. We asked if perhaps one of Trump’s handlers has been doing all of Trump’s tweeting lately, and if that person perhaps isn’t around due to the holidays. Now the whole thing has gotten stranger.

Donald Trump’s Twitter account resumed its mass-retweet habit today, but let’s just say that something was off. Instead of the usual pattern of retweeting minor public figures who repeated Trump’s lies, today’s retweets were of random accounts that seemed to come from nowhere. One of them in particular was, well, off.

An obscure Twitter account called “Jewels in the Verne” posted a tweet attacking CNN’s Alisyn Camerota, wildly misspelling her name in the process. Donald Trump’s account then retweeted this. After that, an account called “JohnRay ClemmonsMAGA” copy-pasted Trump’s retweet as a new tweet. Then Trump’s account retweeted this. If that’s all confusing, that’s the point: the whole thing was convoluted on a bizarre level, as if someone new started handling Trump’s retweets today, but didn’t really understand how Twitter works. There’s more.

It turns out “JohnRay ClemmonsMAGA” is nothing more than an automated parody account. It purports to be making fun of Democratic politician John Ray Clemmons, but in reality consists of nothing more than copy-paste retweets of Donald Trump’s tweets. At the time Trump retweeted this account, it had no followers, and generally received no likes or retweets. How did Trump and/or his handlers even find this account? Something weird is going on here.