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, Facebook, and Truth Social 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.
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.
