You never heard of Fred Trump’s campaign to be mayor of New York City? Really? Well, there might be a good reason for that because Fred Trump never ran for mayor. That didn’t stop someone for producing a couple of “interesting” facsimile campaign ads for the nonexistent campaign. And it didn’t stop Trump Hate from sucking a lot of folks in. From a Politico story headlined Sidney Blumenthal taken in by Fred Trump campaign ads that appear to be fake.

“In 1969, Fred Trump plotted to run for mayor of New York against John Lindsay, a silk-stocking liberal Republican. The reason was simple: in the wake of a New York State Investigations Commission inquiry that uncovered Fred’s overbilling scams, the Lindsay administration had deprived him of a development deal at Coney Island. He made two test television commercials. One of them, called ‘Dope Man’, featured a drug-addled black youth wandering the streets. ‘With four more years of John Lindsay,’ the narrator intoned, ‘he will be coming to your neighbourhood soon.’ The ad flashed to the anxious faces of two well-dressed white women. ‘Vote for Fred Trump. He’s for us.’ The other commercial, ‘Real New Yorkers’, showed scenes of ‘real’ people from across the city, all of them white. Fred Trump, the narrator said, ‘is a real New Yorker too’. In the end he didn’t run, but his campaign themes were bequeathed to his son.”

But the videos were not actually created by Fred Trump’s campaign, because the campaign never existed. Terry Golway, a senior editor at POLITICO who has written extensively about the history of New York City politics, said that he cannot recall Fred Trump ever being mentioned as a potential candidate to run against Lindsay in 1969.

Blumenthal falling for a hoax or conspiracy theory is hardly news. There are times when I bet the guy himself believes the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. But the best part of the story is hidden:

The Washington Post’s Glenn Kessler, who writes the paper’s “Fact Check” column, also shared the videos on Twitter.

When you go to that tweet you find

https://twitter.com/GlennKesslerWP/status/829825123221962752

This is what the tweet looked like:

I have to admit I haven’t laughed this hard in a while. The Washington Post’s own Fact Checker, Glenn Kessler, the same man who rated a Mitt Romney claim “true but false,” was ruthlessly punked by these fake ads and he started spreading them as though they were real… until someone noticed and he deleted his tweet.

This is the guy who thinks he can save you from #FakeNews.