Sheriff candidate’s Facebook page posts fake Trump tweets
President Donald Trump has not weighed in on the threeman race for Orange County sheriff.
But visitors to candidate Darryl Sheppard’s campaign Facebook page might come away thinking the president has taken a great interest in who will become the county’s next top cop.
The page has at least twice featured fake tweets — made to look like posts from the president’s prolific Twitter account, @realDonaldTrump — suggesting the president is backing one or both of Sheppard’s opponents in the Nov. 6 election.
Being falsely associated with Trump could be politically harmful to candidates for office in Orange County, where Republicans are outnumbered by both Democrats and independents, and where voters backed Trump’s 2016 opponent, Hillary Clinton, 60 percent to 35 percent.
In an email, Sheppard, a Democrat, said he “did not create” the images, which he said were sent to the campaign by a supporter.
“I do not follow Trump on Twitter and have no clue if it’s a real tweet,” he said. “Having said that, the content and theme of the material appear accurate and believable. So yes, I could see Trump tweeting something similar.”
The latest fake-tweet image was posted to the Facebook page about 1 a.m. Tuesday. It indicated that Trump was backing Orlando police Chief John Mina in the sheriff ’s race.
“Wow,” the accompanying caption from the Sheppard campaign account added. “Mina = Trump.”
The tweet also falsely referred to Mina as a Republican — the police chief switched his voter registration from Republican to Democrat in September 2017, but is running as an independent — and falsely indicated that Sheppard had been endorsed by Andrew Gillum, the Democratic candidate for Florida governor.
Gillum’s campaign confirmed he has not endorsed in the race.
“The fake tweet from President Donald Trump fabricated and shared by my opponent is a desperate and sad attempt to seek attention,” Mina said in a statement. “Luckily, Orange County voters are smart enough to see through the political games.”
An earlier fake tweet, posted to the Facebook page in September, had the president calling both Mina and the third candidate — former Florida Highway Patrol Chief Joe Lopez, who is also running without party affiliation — “amazing” Trump supporters.
“His tweets may be fake, his endorsements may be lies, and his campaign may not be serious, but I’ll give him credit for one thing,” Lopez said in a statement. “He’s managed do something in this political climate that not many others can. He’s managed to bring the rest of us together to agree that no one has time to deal with his nonsense.”
After both fake-tweet posts, at least some people who saw the images seemed to take them at face value.
“If Trump makes an endorsement, vote for the other guy,” wrote one commenter on the early Tuesday post. Another expressed surprise to learn that Mina was a “Trumpster.”