Website that envisions Hillary as president draws ire
Thousands of furious Trump fans can’t stop visiting a website that pretends Clinton won.
It’s just over a month into Hillary Clinton’s historic presidency, and Milo Yiannopoulos works as a Starbucks barista, the Koch brothers have fled the country and the first woman to occupy the Oval Office is the sober, exacting policy wonk that millions of Americans expected.
Her approval ratings are skyrocketing, her news conferences “oppressively intelligent,” “boring” and “too sane.”
And her vanquished political opponent, Donald Trump, is on the verge of being charged with treason by the Department of Justice.
This liberal fantasy on steroids arrives courtesy of Hillarybeattrump.org, a satirical news site designed to dive deeply under the skin of President Trump and anyone who supports him.
The site channels the Onion’s humor, the National Enquirer’s whacked-out headlines and the Huffington Post’s progressive indignation.
It’s a parody-based parallel universe whose creator intended for it to serve as a trap for Trump supporters online, with a mocking masthead that says: “President Hillary Rodham Clinton.”
In recent days, Breitbart, Fox News, Yiannopoulos and the Daily Caller singled out the site as “fake news” and a place for liberals to seek “refuge from reality.”
The site’s founder — a 30-year-old East Coast writer who asked spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of becoming a conservative target in real life — told that her conservative critics are partially correct: Hillarybeattrump is meant to serve as a refuge from reality for liberals.
But mostly, she said, it’s a chance to troll the opposition whose party actually won the presidency.
“I wanted it to be a joyful middle finger,” the site’s founder said when reached by phone. “I didn’t want to wallow or argue with people who can’t be argued with. There’s something about humor as confrontation that I instinctively thought would work — like a good right jab that I could keep using.”
The joke, it would seem, is not hard to get, even when the joke is just barely a joke.
Using humor as protest, the site operates according to the plainly stated position that Clinton is, in fact, the 45th president of the United States.
“In the midst of a Constitutional crisis, this is our response,” the site’s “About Us” page states. “Long live the true president, Hillary Rodham Clinton.”
How does she respond to critics who accuse her of perpetuating fake news?
“I empathize with people who feel frustrated that things they see on Facebook do not reflect reality as they see it,” she said. “But no, I don’t think anyone can accuse me of misinforming the public en masse or undermining the collective intelligence of public’s political discourse by writing fake news that is so obviously satire.”
She decided to launch the site in January as a defense of Clinton’s legacy and now has five other writers providing additional content.
The site also serves to remind Trump supporters that the actual president lost the popular vote to the fake president by enough voters to populate the city of Chicago — a fact Trump has falsely attributed to voter fraud.
If her bulging inbox of violent and misogynistic hate mail is any indication, the bait appears to be working with some unsettling results.
Since Hillarybeattrump.org was picked up on the conservative-media radar, the site’s creator says it’s been getting about 200,000 visitors per day — enough to keep her busy deleting angry emails for a solid hour each night.