How a Fake Newsman Accidentally Helped Trump Win the White House
Paul Horner thought he was trolling Trump supporters – but after the election, the joke was on him
Out in Phoenix, Arizona, Paul Horner still can't wrap his mind around it. One day he's just a 38-year-old Bernie Sanders fan making up fake news and spreading it far and wide on the Internet, hauling in up to $10,000 a month in ad revenue from phony click-bait stories about gang-rape parties in India and the mascot for a Christian anti-masturbation group being arrested at Sea World for getting it on with itself, along with a bunch of political smoke and mirrors. But then, two weeks ago, the Washington Post reported that his particular line of bull, as promulgated mainly through Facebook, may have played a big part in getting Donald Trump elected to the highest office in the land. "I think Trump is in the White House because of me," Horner told the paper. Suddenly, all hell broke lose and now everyone wants a piece of him. "Inside Edition, CBS News, ABC, the local affiliates, like way more than 60 interview requests," he reports, adding that he's decided to not talk to almost anyone until the situation calms down. "I mean, the Tonight Show used that Post quote and was attacking me because of it. But I didn't mean it like I was trying to get him in the White House," he says. "I was trying to keep him out of it!”
Now, he's worried and aggrieved. All he did is what he's done for the past six years, after a career as a coke-snorting, booze-swilling mortgage company owner and a search-engine-optimization expert. Make stuff up, like "Amish in America Commit Their Vote to Donald Trump." Post it on Facebook. Drive traffic to any of his eight websites, among them abcnews.com.co, so named to make it seem like the real deal. Rake in a bunch of money. And figure that even the stupidest among his readers would soon get the joke.
"Most of my stuff," he says, "starts off, the first paragraph is super legit, the title is super legit, the picture is super legit, but then the story just gets more and more ridiculous and it becomes obvious that none of it is true." Or at least that any claims ought to be seriously fact checked.
Case in point: Last July's fake story about Ted Cruz saying he would endorse Trump if Trump would make masturbation illegal, with Cruz going on to note that "self-love is a silent killer in this country. This needless act of hedonistic indulgence is leading our children down a dark and destructive path. It starts innocently enough with a JCPenney catalog tucked under your mattress, but it quickly spirals out of control, and before you know it, your mother has to call the coroner because you've died from auto-erotic asphyxiation."
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