For many Americans, the days around Thanksgiving are a time to feast and reflect on life’s blessings. Instead, President Donald Trump spent part of Friday rage-tweeting falsities about how many people watched President-elect Joe Biden‘s Thanksgiving speech.
Yesterday, President Donald Trump lashed out against Twitter’s trending topics, which included #DiaperDon, sarcastic tweets “thanking” him, and “tiny desk” jokes.
This morning, while many Americans shopped or slept off massive doses of tryptophan, Trump continued ranting, mostly about his flailing efforts to overturn his election loss.
To make his case, Trump indicated that there’s no way Biden could’ve received a record-shattering 80 million votes because only 1,000 people had watched Biden’s Thanksgiving speech online.
That isn’t true. More than 5 million people have watched Biden’s speech on Twitter alone.
Unsurprisingly, Trump apparently heard this false information on OANN, which based its report on a random tweet, as CNN’s Brian Stelter noted. Trump tagged OANN in his tweet and has pushed OANN recently, as he has railed against Fox News.
OANN was recently temporarily suspended and demonetized by YouTube for violating the site’s coronavirus misinformation policy.
Twitter users scoffed at Trump’s latest gaslighting attempt.
“Here I was thinking, I was a unique, valued person—one of only 1,000 to get a semi-private viewing sent by the intertubes directly to my eyeballs by President-elect Joe Biden,” @fbcooper1 tweeted sarcastically.
There was a time when every mistruth Trump tweeted sent liberals into an angry frenzy. Since he lost the election, his critics have been mostly content to laugh at his attempts to distort reality.
“Rudy Giuliani will release a statement later from Billy Bobs Adult Toys that there is ironclad proof that the 5.2 million views President-elect Joe Biden has on Twitter are fraud & they have proof,” joked @Goss30Goss.
On Wednesday, Trump conceded that he would accept his defeat if the Electoral College casts its votes for Biden. The Electoral College votes on Dec. 14.
More election 2020 coverage
*First Published: Nov 27, 2020, 10:50 am
Claire Goforth
Claire Goforth is an award winning journalist covering politics and justice from her home base in Jacksonville, Florida. Her work has appeared in publications ranging from regional alt-weeklies to Al Jazeera.
