Crafting a fake tweet designed to mock the erratic online presence of our large, dumb President seems like a fairly simple task. Just collect anywhere between five and fifteen buzzwords from the current news cycle, put a few them in all caps, and have no regard for punctuation or grammar. But, now that we’re living in a post-Gorilla Channel world, it’s becoming increasingly difficult to make a ridiculously fake Trump tweet without the general public simply assuming it’s real.
This week, one such fake tweet went viral because people were ready to believe Donald Trump had once called for the President to be loaded into a big cannon and “shot into the sun at TREMENDOUS SPEED” if the “Dow Joans” ever fell more than 1,000 points.
As the retweets started to rack up, the tweet’s author was quick to issue an addendum to his post saying that he never thought for one second anyone would believe it was real. But, after looking at what the President posts on a regular basis, the fake tweet isn’t that hard to believe. It’s got the same random capitalization and nonsensical use of quotation marks we’ve come to expect from the Commander In Chief.
But Trump’s penchant for shit-posting is only half the problem. Image editing software now makes it easier than ever to make realistic-looking tweets or official-seeming documents, and inexperienced users are still too ready to believe that, if it’s online, it must be somewhat true. Of course, an argument could be made that satire is only more effective if people think it’s real. In which case, thanks to the real world becoming just as ridiculous as our wildest imagination, we’re in a golden age of comedy.