A Jersey pop-punk band has accidentally achieved what many political commentators spend careers chasing: going viral with a fake Donald Trump rant – and convincing quite a few people it was the real deal.
88 Bunkface posted a spoof “Truth Social-style” screenshot supposedly from the US President, blasting the band as “terrible” with a “VERY BAD NAME!” and pushing a “radical leftist agenda”.
The post, shared on Facebook by the band, racked up nearly 5,000 likes, over 1,600 comments, and a healthy dose of confusion – with many commenters apparently taking the all-caps tirade at face value.
Among the highlights of the fabricated outburst were complaints about the band playing with musicians from Guernsey (“that island wouldn’t exist without me”) and a swipe at former US President Joe Biden, because no Trump parody would be complete without one.
Unfortunately for fact-checkers everywhere, the joke landed a little too well.
The band later admitted in the comments that the post was “just for the banter” and intended to promote a weekend gig, adding that the response had brought “way more attention than we could have anticipated”.
Whether Donald Trump has 88 Bunkface on his playlist remains, at the time of writing, unconfirmed…