Trump is trolling us again, so stop falling for it

Karen Tumulty, The Washington Post Published 5:15 pm EDT, Monday, May 6, 2019

President Donald Trump has a superpower. With just a few taps to the screen of his iPhone, he can transform his staunchest adversaries into . . . Donald Trump.

No one loves a good conspiracy theory as much as the man in the Oval Office. Indeed, that is how he launched his political career. He was the chief propagator for a shameful lie that the nation's first black president was not born in this country.

He continues to gin up new ones. But in addition to using them to stir his own base, Trump has become highly effective at fomenting preposterous scenarios that send his opposition into a conspiratorial frenzy.

The latest example came over the weekend, when Trump retweeted an obvious, if lame, joke by one of his most devoted sycophants.

"After the best week ever for @realDonaldTrump - no obstruction, no collusion, NYT admits @BarackObama did spy on his campaign, & the economy is soaring," Jerry Falwell Jr., the president of Liberty University, wrote. "I now support reparations - Trump should have 2 yrs added to his 1st term as pay back for time stolen by this corrupt failed coup."

Reparations - get it? Falwell was sucking up to the president, distorting the results of special counsel Robert Mueller's report on Trump's possibly illegal effort to obstruct the investigation of Russian interference in the 2016 election, and making a racially insensitive reference to redressing the abomination of slavery. It was a three-fer, in less than 240 characters.

Trump himself continued the trolling with a tweet that read: "they have stolen two years of my (our) Presidency (Collusion Delusion) that we will never be able to get back."

https://www.stamfordadvocate.com/opinion/article/Trump-is-trolling-us-again-so-stop-falling-for-it-13823344.php