Newsweek
January 31, 2022
Hardcore QAnon followers are confident a fake Mexican Donald Trump Twitter account is directly communicating to them via coded messages.
In the aftermath of Trump's election defeat in 2020, the QAnon conspiracy movement was left fractured, having been abandoned by the anonymous "Q" poster and social media platforms permanently denying a voice to the former president to communicate directly with his followers.
While many QAnon influencers ditched the conspiracy rhetoric and embraced fresh causes centered around unfounded election fraud claims, others sought out anyone who they believed would affirm their views.
One such account latched on to by numerous QAnon followers is Il Donaldo Trumpo, a fake account that frames a mustachioed Trump as a Mexican who poorly imitates a Spanish accent in its tweets.
The bio for the pro-Trump account reads: "Me look like el Presidento, but me no him, señor Twitter Jacko [Jack Dorsey] and his no-hug Twitter niños. I mucho different with glorioso moustachio. Please no ban me again."
Further examples of poorly imitated Spanish include calling various figures, including President Joe Biden, piso****o and erroneously calling his followers "patriotos" when it is "patriotas."
In numerous tweets, the Il Donaldo Trumpo account plays into outdated perceptions of Mexican culture with photos of the mustached Trump wearing a sombrero and "taco Tuesday" posts.
While most people will dismiss the account as a parody attempt, hardcore adherents of the QAnon mythos believe the person behind it is, in actuality, the former president himself.
A spokesperson for Donald Trump has confirmed to Newsweek that the account has absolutely no connection to the former president.
Among those who believe the account is run by Trump are members of the Dallas QAnon faction that waited for JFK Jr. to emerge in Dealey Plaza last year, and now believe the former President is communicating to them via coded messages.
In a January 21 live stream shared on a Telegram channel associated with the Dallas QAnon faction, its de facto leader Michael Protzman revealed to tens of thousands of followers his group had attempted to decode a January 18 tweet by Il Donaldo Trumpo, which read: "I'm Batman."
Using Gematria, a type of numerology that allocates words to numbers, Protzman, known to his followers as Negative 48, explained how he had stayed up late in order to decode the message he believed was for his group.
In response to a question about what he had been doing, Protzman said: "Pretty much sat around doing some coding, stayed up late yesterday. Trump, he was back talking to us and said 'I am Batman,' 'cause Batman's 51 which is 'Michael.'"
Il Donaldo Trumpo's tweet was not lost on other followers associated with Protzman, with one linking the post to a real-life Batman-themed emergency message that was sent out in Missouri earlier this month.
Speaking in a January 23 live stream on a Dallas QAnon faction-affiliated Telegram channel, the follower said: "I live in Missouri and after President Trump did say he was Batman what did we get on our alerts - the Batman signal EBS and who talks about Batman sometimes? Negative 48."
In December, the group wrongly celebrated Trump's birthday, as part of its unfounded belief the former president was adopted into the Trump family.
Il Donaldo Trumpo commands a large following at 282,900, and nearly 200,000 subscribers on Twitter and Telegram, respectively.
The fake Trump account has also created numerous accounts on other social media accounts and video-streaming services, including YouTube.
Many of Il Donaldo Trumpo's posts are shared among QAnon influencers, including lawyer Lin Wood and John Sabal, who command a subscriber count that combined reaches hundreds of thousands of people.
But Mike Rothschild, author of "The Storm is Upon Us: How QAnon Became a Movement, Cult, and Conspiracy Theory of Everything," said it was not surprising QAnon followers believed the account was real.
He pointed to the number of people who mistakenly believed messages written by "Q" on imageboard 8chan were written by people in positions of enormous influence, or by Trump himself.
Speaking to Newsweek, Rothschild said: "It's very similar to what was going on with QAnon where there were certain Q drops that were signed "Q+" and Q believers really thought that that was Donald Trump using 8chan to communicate with them, bypassing the media, bypassing all of his handlers. Trump was directly speaking to them and I think that this thing is the same.
"The particulars are a bit different, but it's the need to believe that you are special, and that the person who you worship and venerate sees how special you are and is communicating with you because you are important and you're going to do something great.
"It's completely ridiculous. Donald Trump does not know how to use 8chan and is famously computer illiterate. He was able to tweet, but only then because people put stuff in front of him and that's all he did."
Donald Trump speaks to reporters on the South Lawn of the White House before boarding Marine One on July 15, 2020 in Washington, DC. Many QAnon followers believe the fake Twitter account is really Donald Trump.
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