The hordes of fake women who desperately want a Trump Tank T-Shirt

One downside to a Twitter-driven Presidency

Open up Twitter, go to any of Donald Trump’s tweets within the last 24 hours, and scroll a bit down the list of replies. There’s a good chance you’ll come across something that looks like this.

Yes, the Trump Tank t-shirt. Just what any red-blooded Trump supporter needs to round out their wardrobe. Sure, maybe it’s not the best time of year to buy a t-shirt, but it will go great with your Ronald Reagan Velociraptor tank top.

Presidential memorabilia is nothing new, and plenty exists for Obama and many other presidents. But the aggressiveness of Trump Tank t-shirt marketing on Twitter is pretty amazing.

For one thing, the only accounts hawking the t-shirt are hacked accounts and sockpuppets. @deplorabgabriel, for example, transformed from a Spanish-language account from 2010–2014…

…into, just yesterday, an English-only “all Trump t-shirt, all the time” account.

In the time it took to write this article, this account was actually suspended from Twitter (which is why I’m using screenshots). But that won’t stop these t-shirt hawkers — there are plenty of accounts to choose from!

Key to this approach is the formula of the sale. Every t-shirt post is structured like this (using a different hacked account):

This is a classic shill (no, not the frivolous accusations of shilling you’ll see on Reddit). These are fake accounts created to give the t-shirt seller credibility among potential customers.

Unsurprisingly, both of these accounts also no longer exist. But have you noticed anything about the number of retweets on the screenshots above? Always at least 41? That’s not by accident — the hawkers have created a horde of fake women to shill for the Trump Tank t-shirt (a sentence I never thought I’d get to write).