Confessions of a Trump Troll – The New Yorker

A middle-aged lawyer recently sat down at a pok restaurant in a North Georgia town. He was sniffling and dabbing his eyes with a napkin. Dont think its corona, he said, pulling up a Web site on his phone with statistics on diagnoses worldwide. Then he looked at Twitter and began talking about a different sort of virus. When Donald Trump first announced his Presidential bid, I told my wife, immediately, Hes going to be the President, he said. The lawyer welcomed the candidacy. How to put this and not sound fifteen? he said. I like chaos. I thrive in it.

For years, the lawyer, who asked not to be identified, worked in Washington, D.C., for the Republican Party. He moved his family south a few years ago, having realized, he said, that D.C. is just Hollywood for ugly people. He found that he had time on his hands. Id never been interested in social media, he said. I cant stand Facebook. But he became intrigued by the power of Twitter. Really repulsive meme-ing, the stuff that makes you laugh, makes you remember, he said. The right, he went on, is great at it instinctively. Whether its a 4chan board or basement neckbeards, they nail it. They can distill a huge talking paragraph into a cat picture. He considers Trumps digital facility absolutely genius, and believes that his frequent Twitter misspellings (Barrack Obama, covfefe) are intentional. In 2015, while the lawyers young children napped, he began trolling. Id have a glass of wine, talk to my wife, watch Netflix, and see what kinds of things we could do, he said. He would sometimes pass four or five hours a day this way.

The lawyer is not a mainstream Republican; he likes Bill Clinton and Bernie Sanders. He was also unbothered by the recent Senate report on Russias election meddling. (If youre not interfering with elections, he said, youre not doing it right.) Out of curiosity, he attended a far-right gathering, where he found the younger attendees to be maybe a little misguided, but well intended. He began creating fake Twitter accounts, he said, to see whether I could get more interactions, more retweets, by being a little more radical. The Confederate flag was often his avatar, or the Bonnie Blue, a lesser-known Confederate banner. For his handles, he made up acronyms with a nationalistic tinge, such as FFK: Faith Folk and Kin. He fashioned the accounts ersatz users as boomers or gun-rights activists. The latter, he said, were easy: Just follow Dana Loesch and interact with those crazy girls who stay up all night tweeting Second Amendment stuff. He added, Id get them to retweet me and then my following would blow up. By the time the 2016 race was under way, he had about twenty accounts, each with a few thousand followers. His fake alt-right accounts amplified Trumps messaging and distorted Hillary Clintons. (Something about her makes me nervous, he said.) His fake Antifa ones spread what he called disinformation and false stories to benefit Trump.

He pulled up an old account with the handle Ruthless Lessruth. This was supposed to be a girl who was married to an alt-right guy, he said. He explained how hed used the account to trick an Antifa group into protesting an alt-right rally that didnt exist: I P.M.d the head of the Atlanta Antifa and told him that my husband was alt-right and that I was repulsed by it. Then, in the guise of the wife, he directed the Atlanta Antifa group to a would-be rally at a Marriott Marquis. A bunch of people showed up. That was hard to do, to pose as a girl with political views that Im not familiar with. Some of his Antifa accounts also pushed veganism. You have to find some community to exploit, he said. Id find an approved vegan account with Antifa leanings and interact with them a bit. It was really tedious. But Im a lawyerI get into the minutiae. Manning accounts on both sides of the political spectrum had its risks. There was always the fear of tweeting something out of the wrong account, he said. Like praising immigration to my alt-right followers or something.

The lawyers trolling dropped off in 2017. Hed become disillusioned by Trump. He hasnt done anything he said he was going to do, the lawyer said. But Id vote for him over Biden. No one is excited about Biden. (I would have pulled for Bernie, he said.) He recently opened a new Twitter account. I just dicked around on it, he said. I watched some of the trending tags. Im not a conspiracy theorist. Theres nothing I think is being hidden from us that I care a lot about. He sighed. Maybe Ive just gotten old.

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Confessions of a Trump Troll - The New Yorker