Donald Trump has been tricked into comparing himself to fascist Italian dictator Benito Mussolini.
The republican presidential hopeful retweeted a quote from a parody Twitter account called “Il Duce 2016,” whose profile picture is a mash up of Mussolini’s face with the iconic Trump hairstyle. Il Duce was a common Italian name for the dictator.
The account only tweets out Mussolini quotes, and attributes them to Donald Trump – making sure to use his Twitter handle which sends a notification gets sent to the real estate mogul.
Sunday morning, Trump retweeted one that must have caught his eye. It said “It is better to live one day as a lion than 100 years as a sheep.”
The quote was attributed to Mussolini from a Time Magazine article from 1942.
In an article titled “How we fooled Donald Trump into retweeting Mussolini,” the website Gawker took credit for the fake Twitter account. Writer Alex Pareene claimed the account was set up in Dec. 2015 by staff to “trap” Trump into retweeting the fascist leader.
“We came up with the idea for that Mussolini bot under the assumption that Trump would retweet just about anything, no matter how dubious or vile the source, as long as it sounded like praise for himself,” Pareene wrote.
Later Sunday morning, Trump said he knew what he was doing when he retweeted Mussolini’s words on Meet the Press.
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