President Donald Trump on Friday morning attempted to bash Twitter and Democratic nominee Joe Biden by tweeting a story from a conservative satirical website that he appeared to accept as real.
Trump shared a spoof story on The Babylon Bee titled “Twitter Shuts Down Entire Network To Slow Spread Of Negative Biden News.” The Babylon Bee describes itself as “the world’s best satire site, totally inerrant in all its truth claims” and uses the tagline: “Fake News You Can Trust.”
The spoof story contained such lines as:
After seeing account after account tweet out one particularly bad story, CEO Jack Dorsey realised he had to take action. Dorsey smashed a glass box in his office reading “Break In Case Of Bad Publicity For Democrats.” Inside the case was a sledgehammer for smashing Twitter’s servers.
And:
Dorsey ran downstairs and started smashing as many computers as he could, but he did need to ask for some help, as the hammer was pretty heavy.
Trump tweeted the article with this straight-faced comment:
“Wow, this has never been done in history,” the president wrote. “This includes his really bad interview last night. Why is Twitter doing this. Bringing more attention to Sleepy Joe & Big T.”
Other satirical stories on The Babylon Bee recently include “Mark Zuckerberg Pops Out Of Man’s Shower To Warn Him The Story He’s Reading Is Fake News” and “Trump Spends Afternoon Shouting From White House Balcony During Twitter Outage.”
Trump has previously acknowledged he doesn’t really scrutinise what he retweets or shares with his 87 million Twitter followers.
“You see something that looks good and you don’t investigate it, and you don’t look at what’s on the helmet exactly, which is in miniature, and you don’t blow it up,” the president told Barstool Sports’ founder Dave Portnoy in July.
Trump was chided during his town hall on NBC Thursday for retweeting conspiracy theories and misinformation. “You’re the president; you’re not someone’s crazy uncle,” said host Savannah Guthrie.
Following Trump’s fake news gaffe, Twitter users were more than happy to point out The Babylon Bee’s satirical nature: