Is Trump pranking C-SPAN?

Before he became president, Donald Trump was notorious for using personas to engage with the media. Now, people are speculating that Trump has revived one of his old pseudonyms:

John Barron

When we say Trump was ‘famous’ for deploying personas, we weren’t exaggerating. There is literally a Wikipedia article on the topic:

As you can see, those aliases are in order:

• John Barron.
• John Miller.
• Carolin Gallego (??).
• David Dennison.

Here’s what that same page says about the John Barron persona:

Trump used the alias “John Barron” (sometimes “John Baron”) throughout the 1980s, with its earliest known usage in 1980 and its last acknowledgment in 1990. According to The Washington Post, the name was a “go-to alias when [Trump] was under scrutiny, in need of a tough front man or otherwise wanting to convey a message without attaching his own name to it”. Barron would be introduced as a spokesperson for Trump, and is even described as a vice president of the Trump Organization in an article by Robert D. McFadden.

This is how that section ends:

Some New York editors recalled that “calls from Barron were at points so common that they became a recurring joke on the city desk”.

Trump stopped using the pseudonym after he was compelled to testify in court proceedings that John Barron was one of his pseudonyms. The Washington Post suggested that Trump might have used the pseudonym longer if not for the “lawsuit in which he testified, under oath in 1990, that ‘I believe on occasion I used that name.’”

And here’s what caller ‘John Barron’ said in the clip at the top:

Well, this is John Barron, and you have… Look, this is the worst decision you’ve ever had in your life, practically. Jack – and Jack’s going to agree with me, right? But this is a terrible decision, and you have Hakeem Jeffries, who – he’s a dope – and you have, Chuck Schumer, who can’t cook a cheeseburger. Of course, these people are happy. Of course, these people are happy.

But true Americans will not be happy. And you have the woman earlier. I assume she’s a woman. She’s a Democrat. But she said… she’s disgraced. She’s devastated.

Confusing, unclear stuff.

In other words, believing it could be him is easy.

But is it?

Journalist Mehdi Hasan suggested it must be a phoney:

It’s certainly true that the caller doesn’t sound exactly like Trump, but then again, neither does Trump at this point.

The man has aged dramatically over the past 12 months, and he’s lost more and more impulse control.

Given that, is it so hard to imagine a sundowning Trump reviving one of his old personas?

Yes, it is, actually.

I’m Carolin Gallego – thanks bigly for reading this article.

Featured image via the Canary