In spite of its affect on my mental health and my blood pressure, I have been following the Twitter feed of President-elect Donald Trump for the past several weeks.
I have commented and written about just how unstable and delusional the man sounds in his tweets.
He scares the daylights out of me because of how unhinged he obviously is. That’s the first observation that I made about his tweets.
But I’ve noticed something else as I’ve scrolled through his feed.
I’ve noticed that immediately after he sends out s self-serving, ego stroking bit of drivel on Twitter, several people respond right away. Like this:
This may be hard to understand, but we would like our future elections to not have a sprinkling of Russian involvement.
— MatthewDicks (@MatthewDicks) January 7, 2017
Or this:
— The Socialist Party (@OfficialSPGB) January 7, 2017
Then I noticed that after a bunch of tweets essentially laughing at the President-elect, there are suddenly a bunch of ads for coffee cups. Coffee cups that show Donald Trump in front of fireworks and other celebratory images. Or coffee cups with a label “Liberal Tears.”
The ads appear in nearly every thread on Trump’s feed, although he have to scroll through a lot of crap to get to them.
OK. At first I just figured they were something that Trump folks were enjoying. I get it. Who cares?
But then I looked a little bit closer, and guess what?
The tweets are all identical, even on different threads. They are made to look like a “real” conversation between two “real” people.
https://twitter.com/DanielC55391792/status/817710327961944064
https://twitter.com/SharonPMurphy/status/817673893431242752
https://twitter.com/JamesKPerrin/status/817702594294509568
And it goes on and on. You find these exact same tweets (complete with grammatical error) on almost every Trump tweet.
What can this mean? Is someone in the Trump camp seriously pretending to be a bunch of different people just to send out this stupid image of cups?
I decided to track down the supposed seller of the “viral” mugs. It got even weirder. I clicked on the seller in one tweet and landed on this Facebook page.
Then I saw another link on a different, but identical, tweet that supposedly asked where to get the mug. I was brought to this site:
When I searched for the mugs online, I found them in the “Trump Store” at a site called “TeeSpring.”
So. What’s the deal here?
I don’t know for sure. I do know that TeeChip.com has a lot of customer complaints. I do know that at least four different “people” are using Twitter to push these mugs.
It’s kind of left me wondering.
What if Donald Trump is sitting in his Trump Tower office pretending to be “Elizabeth Scott” and “Sharon Murphy”? What if he’s trying to make a couple of extra bucks selling mugs?
Would anyone actually be surprised?
Featured image by Esther Vargas via Flickr. (CC BY-SA 2.0)
