Donald Trump caught quoting fake Twitter user who has never tweeted anything

| 3:43 am EDT June 5, 2017
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Donald Trump’s Twitter account has been gaining an alarming number of obviously fake new followers this past week, leading many to question what their purpose might be. It’s also been revealed that around half of Trump’s thirty million followers are fake accounts in general. But now it turns out that in at least one instance, Trump has quoted a fake account that had never tweeted anything to begin with, and didn’t even exist at the time.

Investigative journalist @RobPulseNews has unearthed a Donald Trump tweet from June of 2014 which raises eyebrows for a number of reasons. Trump quoted a Twitter user named @nklaeger in the following fashion:

Here’s the trouble: the account @nklaeger never tweeted that to begin with. In fact @nklaeger has never tweeted anything, and didn’t even exist at the time. Trump quoted @nklaeger in June, but the @nklaeger account wasn’t created until July. So how is that even possible?

Although Twitter has an auto-quote feature, Donald Trump has always manually quoted people by copy-pasting their original tweets into his own tweets. Except in this instance Trump couldn’t have copy-pasted the tweet from @nklaeger because there was no @nklaeger at the time. We’ve checked archive.org, and there is no record of tweets having been posted to this account and then deleted; Trump really did quote a Twitter user who didn’t exist yet. A couple of possible explanations come to mind.

One is that Trump screwed up his copy-paste job and unwittingly quoted the wrong user. But this seems unlikely, because a Twitter search for that particular tweet reveals nothing beyond Trump’s own quote of it (link). Another scenario would be a darker one: Trump was told to post the quote from a fake bot account that was to be created by his team, but someone screwed up and never created the bot account in question. In this scenario, someone could have grabbed the username for the sake of novelty once they saw Trump quoting it, thus preventing Trump’s team from being able to go back and cover its tracks.

But the bigger upshot here is that this may not have been the only instance of Donald Trump quoting a Twitter supporter who didn’t exist. His habit of manually quoting his supporters via copy-paste, when Twitter offers an easy to use auto-quote feature, has always stood out as odd. Is this why he’s always used the copy-paste method? This requires a reexamination of every instance of Trump quoting a supporter on Twitter going back several years. We urge you to help us crowdsource it.