A bunch of foolish Trump fans just fell for a hilarious prank

Trump supporters are, across the board, characterized by their ability to believe just about anything. A willful ignorance of facts is fundamental to their continued defense of a man with such a well-documented adversarial relationship with reality. It’s not surprising then that these peoples’ credulity extends to other spheres.

According to The Columbus Dispatch, a group of Trump supporters flocked to an outdoors store in North Carolina over the weekend with plans to counterprotest against an Antifa rally. As is all-too-common with modern Republican protestors, the crowd was dotted with Confederate flags and pro-Trump memorabilia. Some of them even traveled in from out of the county to show their opposition to the antifascist movement.

The problem? The Antifa rally didn’t exist and the Trumpists were fooled by a Facebook post on the page “Gaston County Antifa” which claimed that antifascists would be showing up to the store en masse. The display photo on the Facebook page is a preposterous man in an ill-fitting tactical outfit that anyone with a modicum of sense would realize is a joke after even a second of scrutiny.

The page claimed that Antifa members “from at least 10 states” would be traveling to the Gandor Outdoors store located at the Franklin Square shopping center in Gastonia to petition for the removal of a Nazi statue that doesn’t actually exist. There is, however, a Confederate statue, which at least partly explains the traitor flags waving in the crowd.

Additionally, the fake page posted a photograph of people in the woods with the claim that it had been taken in a nearby area, but the same image has also apparently been used by other Antifa Facebook pages across the country.

The Dispatch reports that, other than the Facebook group, there is no evidence of an Antifa chapter actually existing in the area. Even though this was clearly an effort to convince Trump supporters to make fools of themselves, some of them seem unperturbed and determined to continue living in their little fantasy world.

“But you see the true supporters. We don’t care if it’s a prank. We’re going to show up because what’s going to happen is they’re going to call this and then we ain’t going to show up and then they’re going to really burn down an American flag and it’s going to cause someone to seriously have problems,” one of the Trump supporters told The Columbus Dispatch.

Once again, Trump’s base has proven itself to be incapable of discriminating between the real world and their own paranoid delusions. These people are deeply terrified of things that don’t even exist and the only way to combat their dangerous ideas is to vote their leaders out of office.

 

Natalie Dickinson

Natalie is a staff writer for the Washington Press. She graduated from Oberlin College in 2010 and has been freelance blogging and writing for progressive outlets ever since.