Several giddy Democrats chomping at the bit to post former President Donald Trump’s mugshot Thursday night were duped into peddling a fake, photoshopped mugshot before the actual image was released.
The Twitter/X account for Occupy Democrats, which has 604,000 followers but a larger following on Facebook, fell for the fake image:
“KARMA: Trump’ official mugshot is released by the Fulton County Jail. Someone doesn’t look very happy!” the now-deleted post read.
It later posted the real photo:
BREAKING: Trump’s REAL mugshot just got released… and he doesn’t look too happy!😆
Source: CNN pic.twitter.com/deTT7N7maC
— Occupy Democrats (@OccupyDemocrats) August 25, 2023
Left-wing commentator and sports broadcaster Keith Olbermann, who called for then-President Trump’s arrest in November 2020 and suggested he should face the death penalty over coronavirus deaths, was another victim of the photoshopped image:
Breaking: If Trump practiced this, he didn’t practice hard enough pic.twitter.com/NhAoqOhg6Q
— Keith Olbermann⌚️ (@KeithOlbermann) August 24, 2023
“Breaking: If Trump practiced this, he didn’t practice hard enough,” Olbermann wrote.
Olbermann later posted both images side-by-side, writing, “Ok so it was a surprisingly good guess,” in what seemed to be an attempt to play his error off:
Ok so it was a surprisingly good guess pic.twitter.com/SQEaARsTEM
— Keith Olbermann⌚️ (@KeithOlbermann) August 25, 2023
Jon Cooper, a progressive social media personality who was the national finance chairman for Draft Biden, posted the photoshopped picture to his 1.3 million followers before deleting it and sharing the correct one:
Donald Trump’s mugshot:#TrumpMugShot pic.twitter.com/K1CeTGOA67
— Jon Cooper (@joncoopertweets) August 25, 2023
The Daily Beast reported in 2020 that Cooper, “a Biden superfan,” had a track record of publishing fast and loose tweets that were, in some cases, incorrect. Some on the right posted the false image as well during the anticipation.
While the fake image was circulating and the world awaited the legitimate, now-iconic mugshot, Trump surrogate Kari Lake jokingly posted an outlandish AI-generated picture of Trump with a mullet:
Lots of fake mugshots right now.
This is real. pic.twitter.com/zBeZtLhP29
— Kari Lake (@KariLake) August 25, 2023
“Lots of fake mugshots right now. This is real,” she wrote.
The real image went viral immediately after it was released from the Fulton County Jail, and it was quickly fashioned into memes. Trump used his first post on Twitter/X in over two years to share the image accompanied by the captions “ELECTION INTERFERENCE” and “NEVER SURRENDER.” As of midday Friday, the tweet had made nearly 160 million impressions while garnering more than 1 million likes and hundreds of thousands of retweets:
https://t.co/MlIKklPSJT pic.twitter.com/Mcbf2xozsY
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) August 25, 2023
Conservatives celebrated Trump’s return to the platform, with some writing, “We are so back,” and others cheering, “HE’S BACK!”
WATCH — President Trump Following Georgia Booking: “We Did Nothing Wrong at All”:
C-SPAN
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