Feel like this needs its own thread. 
For months, a 21-year-old Trump supporter impersonated Trump family members on Twitter, spreading conspiracy theories, asking for money and eventually drawing the attention of the president.
By Jack Nicas
Last month, between tweets disputing his election loss, President Trump posted an article from a conservative website that said his sister Elizabeth Trump Grau had just joined Twitter to publicly back her brother’s fight to overturn the vote.
- Dec. 8, 2020Updated 2:22 p.m. ET
“Thank you Elizabeth,” Mr. Trump wrote on Twitter. “LOVE!”
But the Twitter account that prompted the article was not his sister’s. It was a fake profile run by Josh Hall, a 21-year-old food-delivery driver in Mechanicsburg, Pa.
“I was like, ‘Oh, my goodness. He actually thinks it’s his sister,’” Mr. Hall, a fervent Trump supporter, said in an interview last week.
It was a surreal coda to nearly a year of deception for Mr. Hall. Since February, he had posed as political figures and their families on Twitter, including five of the president’s relatives. He had pretended to be Robert Trump, the president’s brother; Barron Trump, the president’s 14-year-old son; and Dr. Deborah L. Birx, the White House coronavirus response coordinator. The accounts collectively amassed more than 160,000 followers.
Using their identities, he gained attention by mixing off-color political commentary with wild conspiracy theories, including one that the government wanted to implant Americans with microchips, and another that John F. Kennedy Jr., who died in a plane crash in 1999, was alive and about to replace Mike Pence as vice president.
“There was no nefarious intention behind it,” Mr. Hall said. “I was just trying to rally up MAGA supporters and have fun.”
Many of those “Make America Great Again” followers appeared to believe the posts. Records also show that some accounts served another purpose: directing people to give Mr. Hall money. They promoted a fund-raiser for a political group Mr. Hall created called “Gay Voices for Trump.” In an interview, he admitted that the group didn’t exist. The fund-raiser brought in more than $7,300.
Mr. Hall’s Twitter spree seems to be a case of mischief spun out of control, illustrating how a person simply needs a phone and some knowledge of the internet to start trouble that gets the attention of hundreds of thousands of people.
Mr. Hall was hardly the first self-professed Trump fan to try to profit off fellow Trump backers. Federal prosecutors, for example, said in August that Steve Bannon, President Trump’s former adviser, and three others had solicited donations to build a border wall and then pocketed more than $1 million.
And he was hardly the first person to create a fake online persona. Fake accounts have been instrumental in the spread of conspiracy theories, and scammers have repeatedly posed as celebrities, soldiers and even Mark Zuckerberg to defraud people on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram.
Those companies said they remove millions of fake profiles each year. Yet Mr. Hall showed that it was still fairly simple to impersonate key White House officials and the president’s family, including his teenage son, and amass tens of thousands of followers before Twitter took notice.
Millions of people have been lured down dark internet rabbit holes like QAnon, a pro-Trump conspiracy theory that claims satanic Democrats abuse and eat children and is fueled by someone posing as a government official. By comparison, Mr. Hall was a small-timer. His escapades in the alternate reality universe might have gone unnoticed — until Mr. Trump’s mistaken tweet elevated him to the big time of MAGA misinformation.
The New York Times identified Mr. Hall as the person behind the fake Trump accounts, which have now all been taken down by Twitter, and constructed a recap of his deception via screenshots of some of his tweets and an archive of many others collected by Ian Kennedy and Melinda Haughey, University of Washington researchers who use software to save millions of tweets about the election and pandemic. The Times also interviewed Mr. Hall, people close to him and people he misled online.
Mr. Hall said he became interested in politics in 2016 when he was a teenager, energized by Mr. Trump. “I kind of thought he was like a clown at first,” he said. “But the more I heard him talk, I realized: Yeah, he says kind of off-the-wall things, but I do agree with what he’s saying.”
He dreamed of becoming a conservative talk-radio host, he said, so he opted against college and decided to instead build a persona online. He sparred with liberals on Twitter; created a “public figure” page on Facebook; and self-published a 49-page e-book on Amazon called “Hall Nation” that detailed his “38 essential rules to live life in order to be happy and successful.” (The first rule? “Insults are a good thing.”)
Offline, he was not so successful. He struggled to hold a job, he said, including stints as a hotel clerk and sandwich maker. Most recently, he delivered food for DoorDash.
But online, he started to develop a small following. In January, he asked followers to help him pay for a lawyer, saying “a Planned Parenthood loving radical leftist” whom he used to date had accused him of harassment. He also began selling T-shirts that said “Josh Hall did nothing wrong.” He raised $815 on GoFundMe. Court documents indicate he is using a public defender. A hearing in the case is scheduled for later this month.
Mr. Hall said that around that time Twitter suspended his account without explanation. “Once I got banned from Twitter, my attitude was kind of like, ‘What the hell, I’m just going to have fun now,’” he said. (A Twitter spokesman said the company suspended his original account because he had created multiple accounts under different identities.)
So he started a new account under a different name: Rod Blagojevich, the former Democratic governor of Illinois best known for trying to sell a U.S. Senate seat. Mr. Blagojevich’s prison sentence had just been commuted by President Trump, making him a sudden ally in the eyes of some conservatives.
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One of Mr. Hall’s Twitter posts impersonating Rod Blagojevich, the former Democratic governor of Illinois.
“OBAMA STARTED THE CORONAVIRUS,” Mr. Hall wrote on Feb. 27 under Mr. Blagojevich’s photo and a profile named @GovBlago. It was typical fare for the account, which eventually drew more than 26,000 followers. For much of the time it was active, the profile included a disclaimer in its bio that it was a parody account, which Twitter allows under some conditions.
The rest of Mr. Hall’s impostor accounts did not include such disclaimers.
Twitter eventually removed the @GovBlago account, prompting Mr. Hall to impersonate someone else in the headlines: Dr. Birx, the White House official working on the pandemic. “The media is lying to you about this virus,” he wrote as @DoctorBirx on April 22. The pandemic was “plotted by the powers that be to crash our economy in hopes that Trump will pay for it in November.”
The account didn’t gain much traction, so he moved on to a brand that was sure to attract more eyeballs: The Trump family. Mr. Hall said he went on Wikipedia to find Trump relatives who didn’t yet have Twitter accounts, and first landed on Robert Trump, the president’s brother.
As @BigRobTrump, he quickly gained more than 25,000 followers, partly by spreading conspiracy theories. “The coronavirus was planned and released onto the world by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation,” Mr. Hall said as Robert Trump. It was unclear if Mr. Hall believed such lies or if he thought they were just good at attracting attention, but they had become almost banalities in the conspiracy-filled corners of the internet where he spent much of his time.
When Twitter removed the first Robert Trump account, Mr. Hall started a new one, this time under the username @UncleRobTrump. It did even better, ultimately collecting more than 77,000 followers from July to August.
As the new Robert Trump account gained influence, Mr. Hall began using it to promote his own Twitter profile, @TheBiTrumpGuy.
On that account, Mr. Hall, who said he is bisexual, called himself the founder of a group called Gay Voices for Trump. Mr. Hall used the fake Robert Trump profile to promote the group.
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Mr. Hall used one of his accounts to promote another one he ran.
“Uncle Rob runs Gay Voices For Trump with @TheBiTrumpGuy, although I am very much a heterosexual male. It’s the Trump genes - we love women,” Mr. Hall wrote as Robert Trump in July. “But we are trying to reach out to LGBT and other minority voters. Josh is doing great work so please give him a follow and support him!” The tweets brought Mr. Hall’s real profile thousands of new followers.
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