Politics - News Analysis

Trump Aide Says Campaign Paid Actors to Appear at 2015 Campaign Launch Despite Earlier Denial

The public relations organizer of Donald Trump’s 2015 presidential campaign launch has allegedly come forward to confirm what many of us had already suspected: the campaign team did indeed pay actors to cheer for the new candidate, HuffPost reports.

Business Insider is reporting that a mob of fake Trump supporters hailed the then-presidential candidate as he descended the Trump Tower escalator to make his announcement. Met with a crowd of smiling faces, the candidate looked out on a scene that looked like something out of The Apprentice, Trump’s reality TV show.

“The reality is we hired 50 people, some of whom were part-time actors I found out later on,” David Schwartz, from the public relations firm Gotham Government Relations & Communication told the financial news website.

Schwartz said his firm was hired to organize the event and he added that the actors (I prefer the term “fakers”) made up a small portion of the people on hand for the event.

“That event was really our brainchild: The most famous escalator ride in the history of politics was that one,” Schwartz said. “Bottom line is, we had thousands of people there and then the press accused us of hiring thousands of actors. Based on the fee that I got, that would not have been a good business decision on anyone’s part.”

Schwartz’s firm also followed up by posting a video of the staged event on YouTube. That later led to mockery from the creators of The Apprentice because Trump’s elevator ride was pilfered from the program.

Bill Pruitt was a producer for the program and he described the portrayal of Trump and his business in The Apprentice as a scam.

“That was an entertainment,” Pruitt explained in The Confidence Man, a documentary about Trump that’s part of the Dirty Money Series on Netflix.

“Most of us knew he was a fake,” program editor Jonathan Braun told The New Yorker in a 2019 interview. “He had just gone through I don’t know how many bankruptcies. But we made him out to be the most important person in the world. It was like making the court jester the king.”

But did the court jester become the emperor who has no clothes? I mean, this time-worn phrase is used to describe a situation where people believe something that is not true. Trump has continually led his supporters to believe lots of untruths so the fact that his handlers hired people to applaud him as he declared his presidential intentions isn’t really surprising now is it?

meet the author

Megan has lived in California, Nevada, Arizona, Texas, Louisiana, Mississippi, and Florida and she currently lives in Central America. Living in these places has informed her writing on politics, science, and history. She is currently owned by 15 cats and 3 dogs and regularly owns Trump supporters when she has the opportunity. She can be found on Twitter at https://twitter.com/GaiaLibra and Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/politicalsaurus

Comments

Comments are currently closed.