Donald Trump
| Donald Trump | |
| Known for | 45th President of the United States |
|---|---|
| Birth | June 14, 1946 |
| Death | |
Donald John Trump is a third-generation real estate developer who was the forty-fifth president of the United States from 2017 to 2021.
Use of the internet to spread misinformation
Donald Trump used Twitter and Facebook to spread misinformation. Misinformation stated by Donald Trump was also spread to other platforms by other users.
The false conspiracy theory that Barack Obama, the first African-American president, was ineligible for the position due to being born in Africa, when he was in fact born in the US state of Hawaii, was spread by Donald Trump on Twitter. According to ABC News, Donald Trump tweeted or retweeted this conspiracy theory at least 67 times from 2011 until his ban from Twitter on January 8, 2021.
In 2015, Trump retweeted another false conspiracy about Barack Obama that was started by the anti-Democrat website Breitbart. The false conspiracy theory claimed Barack Obama supported the Islamist terrorist organization Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS).
In 2016, during his ultimately successful campaign for President of the United States, Donald Trump promoted several conspiracies against his opponents.
Trump mentioned an unfounded conspiracy theory in a Fox News interview that was started by the National Enquirer. This conspiracy theory, which was further spread through Twitter, stated that US Senator Ted Cruz's father was involved in Lee Harvey Oswald's murder of US president John F. Kennedy.
Trump retweeted false conspiracy theories that Seth Rich, an employee of the Democratic National Committee, was murdered because he sent documents to WikiLeaks that were damaging to Hillary Clinton's ultimately unsuccessful campaign for President of the United States.
Trump revived a false conspiracy in an interview with The Washington Post that was started in the 1994 conspiracy film, The Clinton Chronicles. This conspiracy theory, which was further spread through Twitter, inferred that the July 1993 suicide of then-deputy White House counsel Vince Foster was actually a murder that was carried out by, or covered up by, then-President Bill Clinton and then-First Lady Hillary Clinton.
In 2017, the unfounded QAnon conspiracy theory started when anonymous individual or individuals used the name "Q" to spread baseless conspiracies about a criminal cabal of Democrats and celebrities would be thwarted by President Trump. Donald Trump retweeted the conspiracy and alluded to it several times before fully embracing it at his rallies and on his Truth Social platform in 2022.
In 2019, Donald Trump tweeted the false conspiracy theory that sexual predator Jeffery Epstein didn't commit suicide in prison, but was instead murdered by Bill Clinton.
In 2020, Donald Trump ran his ultimately unsuccessful re-election campaign for President of the United States. As had done in 2016, Trump retweeted various conspiracy theories against his opponents.
A false conspiracy theory was pushed by Trump, which was further spread through Twitter at a press conference. As he had done with Barack Obama, who was the first African-American President of the United States, Donald Trump erroneously stated that Kamala Harris, who would become the first African-American and Asian-American Vice President of the United States, wasn't born in the United States and thus wasn't eligible to become vice president.
Trump promoted the unfounded conspiracy theory that stated that when he was Vice President of the United States, Joe Biden pressured Ukraine. This pressure was supposedly meant to cause the firing of the top prosecutor of Ukraine to protect Biden's son Hunter, who worked for the Ukrainian gas company Burisma, from being investigated.
Also in 2020, Trump tweeted a false conspiracy theory that then-MSNBC host Joe Scarborough murdered Lori Klausutis, a woman who worked in Scarborough's Florida office when he served as a United States Representative for the first district of Florida.
On January 6, 2021, after failing to stop an insurrection carried out by his supporters at the United States Capitol, he was banned from Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, and Instagram over fears that he would incite more violence.
Founding of Truth Social
Due to being banned from the major social media platforms, Donald Trump formed Trump Media & Technology Group with then-Representative Devin Nunes of California as its chief executive officer in February 2022.
Trump Media & Technology Group released Truth Social, a social network with a userbase comprised mostly of people with a far-right political ideology, for iOS on February 21, 2022. On May 20, 2022, Truth Social was updated so that it could be used via the web. On August 30, 2022, Google stated that it would not approve Truth Social for release for Android on Google Play due to a violation of its policies prohibiting physical threats and incitement to violence. However, after stronger content moderation policies were implemented, Truth Social was approved by Google for release on Google Play on October 12, 2022.
Donald Trump's social media accounts were reinstated on Twitter on November 19, 2022, on Facebook and Instagram on January 25, 2023, and on YouTube on March 17, 2023. After his YouTube ban was lifted, Trump began posting on Facebook and YouTube again.
Appearance in video games
His likeness appeared in the 2002 video game Donald Trump's Real Estate Tycoon, the 2012 video game The Political Machine 2012, the 2016 video game The Political Machine 2016, and the 2020 video game The Political Machine 2020.
