By The Independent (World News) | Created at 2024-09-24 17:45:21 | Updated at 2024-09-30 09:36:24
5 days ago
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Former President Donald Trump shared a baseless claim pushed by an OnlyFans model that people are being paid to attend Vice President Kamala Harris’s campaign rallies.
Trump shared a TikTok video by Samantha Gangewere on Truth Social on Monday.
“I just left my nail salon and my nail tech said their one cousin is in South Philly and she is getting paid $700 a week to go to wherever Kamala’s campaign tells them to go to,” Gangewere says in the video shared by the former president. “She’s not even a citizen, she can’t vote, but she wants that extra money.”
Trump has frequently shared false claims suggesting that any indication of grassroots excitement surrounding the Harris campaign is either wholly fake or the result of attendees being paid to be there.
Even back in 2016, he claimed that demonstrations against him before and after the election were attended by paid protesters. Similarly, Trump made the claim earlier this year that protests in support of Palestine at Columbia University were attended by “paid agitators” and “professional agitators.” Last month, Trump said an image of a large crowd at a Harris rally was AI-generated.
In the TikTok video posted by Trump, Gangewere said: “Their campaign is getting a bunch of people, that’s why you see these people on the side of the road with signs or whatever going to these protests.”
There has been no evidence to back up Gangewere’s claims of paid actors at Harris rallies.
She added: “They get travel paid for and everything and they’re not even able to vote.”
Gangewere has almost two million followers on Instagram and is the co-owner of a steakhouse in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, alongside her husband, according to The Daily Beast.
The model has made transphobic comments in the past, such as suggesting that trans people belong “in a mental ward.”
Last year, she wrote: “Y’all are way too concerned about [Trump].”
“We got trannys running around thinking their biological woman [sic] shooting up our schools,” she added.
Reuters noted last year that the vast majority of mass shooting suspects are cis men.
