Kathy Griffin Shares Satirical Trump Tweet, But Not Everyone Is in on the Joke

Quick Take

Dozens of former President Donald Trump’s supporters gathered outside his Florida home to protest a recent FBI search of the building. The activity triggered a satirical tweet falsely attributed to Trump’s eldest son, purportedly telling supporters to disperse, and saying, “We have many important people coming through the club and need to keep it clean.”

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Dozens of former President Donald Trump’s supporters gathered outside his home at the Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida after the building was searched by the FBI on Aug. 8.

Agents recovered some materials described as confidential, secret and top secret, according to a list of seized items that was unsealed with the search warrant on Aug. 12.

Although the reason for the search wasn’t publicly disclosed at the time, it was widely assumed that the search was related to the National Archives and Records Administration’s ongoing efforts to retrieve documents from the former president. But Trump’s supporters protested the FBI’s actions and held signs and flags with Trump campaign slogans.

Now a fake tweet attributed to Trump’s eldest son, Donald Trump Jr., is circulating online. The tweet was created as satire, but it’s been shared widely without a disclaimer explaining it was satirical.

The phony tweet said: “While my Father loves almost all his supporters, please do not come to Mar-a-Lago to support President Trump. We have many important people coming through the club and need to keep it clean.”

The original version included a fictitious time stamp of “6:99 AM” and an attribution to “Parody by Back Rub” at the bottom — both of which clearly indicate that the tweet isn’t real. It was shared by a satirical Twitter account.

But the image has now been shared without those indicators at the bottom.

Even versions of the claim that did include the satirical clues at the bottom have confused social media users. For example, many of the commenters on comedian Kathy Griffin’s Facebook post that shared the fake tweet — with the “parody” label — didn’t appear to understand it was fabricated. One of Griffin’s 1 million followers wrote, “So he admits that his supporters are NOT important or clean people!!”

But, as we said, the tweet didn’t come from Donald Trump Jr. Screen captures of his Twitter account from the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine also show that he never posted the tweet.

Similar claims — using either intentionally misleading fake tweets or phony tweets that were originally made as satire — have been going around for years. We’ve written about at least a dozen of them before.

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