Philippe Reines explains how he was duped by fake Donald Trump tweet that went viral

Brett T. | 10:07 PM on February 05, 2018

As the saying goes, when it comes to Trump, there’s a tweet for everything, so there just had to be a tweet somehow befitting the drop in the Dow Jones Industrial Average Monday. This was that tweet:

https://twitter.com/ShaunUsher/status/960628825318219776

The only thing is … that tweet is fake.

https://twitter.com/ShaunUsher/status/960632508865024000

This tweet is going Gorilla Channel. https://t.co/HvYv7Q2eUX

— Dave Sund (@davesund) February 6, 2018

Still, it was retweeted at least 13,000 times by Twitter luminaries ranging from the executive editor of Bloomberg View to Rosie O’Donnell.

What amazes me the most about the fake Trump “Dow Joans” tweet is the number of people in the media who uncritically assumed it was real without doing even the most rudimentary of fact checking. pic.twitter.com/OGvEmXYzqK

— Alex VanNess (@thealexvanness) February 5, 2018

https://twitter.com/instapundit/status/960679042298105856

Senior advisor to Hillary Clinton Philippe Reines played it cool though; even though he’d retweeted the fake tweet, he didn’t delete it, but instead played up how convincing of a fake it was.

His questionable quotation mark usage goes way back. pic.twitter.com/viSLGDdVnr

— Philippe Reines (@PhilippeReines) February 5, 2018

False alarm, put “away” the cannon helmet. He wasn’t talking about the Dow Jones. So we have to “wait” for the Dow JOANS to drop 1,000.

And yes, it’s amazing “how” there’s a Tweet for every occasion. It’s like he did nothing else while his “businesses” went bankrupt six times.

— Philippe Reines (@PhilippeReines) February 5, 2018

Every word of it was believable. Every word. Every errant quotation mark. Every misspelling. Every hypocrisy. Every misconception about astrophysics. Every everything.

Someone deserves creativity points.

@shaunuaher is it you? https://t.co/P1rvbpLbcP

— Philippe Reines (@PhilippeReines) February 5, 2018

Someone deserves creativity points, and that would be Reines for trying to spin falling for a fake tweet. Did we mention how many journalists fell for this thing too?

https://twitter.com/ShaunUsher/status/960643542937997312

https://twitter.com/ShaunUsher/status/960646676196352000

https://twitter.com/ShaunUsher/status/960648933507850246

https://twitter.com/ShaunUsher/status/960650949957242880

We bet Alan Grayson would have caught this in a second if he had kept that gig with Politifact.