Fake News: Lindsey Graham Did NOT Threaten To Convert To Democrat If Republicans Don't Dump Trump

Fact Check

  • by: Maarten Schenk

Fake news site spinzon.com recently posted a hoax article titled: "Lindsey Graham Threatens To Convert To Democrat If Republicans Don't Dump Trump". It opens:

During a time when the Republican Party's presumptive nominee, Donald Trump, should be working to bring the party together and prepare for the primary battle against Hillary Clinton, he continues to deepen the divide between Republicans and Americans alike.

Trump's recent attack on U.S. District Judge Gonzalo Curiel because of his Mexican-American background prompted Sen. Lindsey Graham to round up the Republicans who have previously endorsed Donald Trump, and persuade them to take it all back.

First clue this article is fake: it still calls Donald Trump the "presumptive nominee" while he has been sworn in as president two months ago already. Could it be that this article is old? It also references Trump's "recent" attack on U.S. District Judge Gonzalo Curiel, something which also happened several months ago, well before the election.

Second clue: the article doesn't actually mention Graham saying he is going to switch to the Democrats. It has some quotes from him but those all date from before the election and reference issues that happened back then:

Graham claimed that Trump's racist remarks were "the most un-American thing from a politician since Joe McCarthy."

"If anybody was looking for an off-ramp, this is probably it," Graham told The New York Times."

Senator Graham elaborated on this during an interview with NBC News' Hallie Jackson.

"There are a lot of people who want to be loyal to the Republican Party, including me," he said. "But there'll come a point in time where we're gonna have to understand that it's not just about the 2016 race, it's about the future of the party and I would like to support our nominee. I just can't."

The last and final clue: if you google some sentence fragments from the article you end up on an article by Aaron Kesel posted June 9th 2016 titled "LINDSEY GRAHAM WILL BECOME A DEMOCRAT IF REPUBLICANS SELECT TRUMP". The current article is largely copy-pasted from there but with a different headline.

Despite containing no actual news the story took off on Facebook as you can see in the Trendolizer graph at the end of this article. If you notice anyone spreading this poorly executed fake you can help by pointing them to this article here because nobody likes being fooled by an article that is several months old and which has a fake headline.

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