Twitter has rules against impersonation — and for good reason. The platform is valuable to individuals for voicing their own personal opinions and sharing news, and an impersonator can harm the integrity of the real individual. However, when Donald Trump is the one being impersonated, there are hundreds of thousands of other users who are fine crossing that line.
Chet Porter, ever the deft Twitter user, recently changed his display name to ‘Donald J. Trump’ complete with a photo of him for his profile picture. In his tweet, he wrote, “Fuck. Just pissed my pants… Also I just found out I’m a big stupid racist child molester… Not a good day.”
Fuck. Just pissed my pants… Also I just found out I’m a big stupid racist child molester… Not a good day.
— Donald J. Trump sucks (@chetporter) June 7, 2020
The tweet blew up. Right now, it has nearly 150k retweets and over 850k likes, which is an insane amount of engagement. It went viral enough, in fact, that Twitter had to take notice and rescinded Chet’s verification for the breach of its rules.
Now, his display name is ‘Donald J. Trump sucks,’ as a requirement to unlocking his account after Twitter’s notification.
we made it 4 hours. much longer than i thought. fuck donald trump pic.twitter.com/JFxEmxuGUn
— Donald J. Trump sucks (@chetporter) June 7, 2020
As CNN’s Angela Dewan and Jennifer Hansler wrote, “At a time where most leaders would call for national unity, Trump has threatened to use the military across the country to achieve ‘total domination,’ branding protesters as ‘thugs,’ even ‘terrorists.’”
Photo via Rukes.com