That was a lie. Meidas Touch reports:
David Zere, host of the MAGA Real America’s Voice show Breaking Point, kicked off a firestorm of social media misinformation Friday when he falsely claimed that disgraced former President Donald Trump had paid off the mortgage for the family of slain NYPD officer Jonathan Diller.
Trump used the wake for Officer Diller, who was killed at a traffic stop on Monday, as a photo op, posing for cameras in front of a line of NYPD officers and railing against crime in the U.S.
“We have to get back to law and order. We have to do a lot of things differently. This is not working. This is happening too often,” Trump said, despite violent crime rates being lower now than they were during his presidency.
Zere said in an interview with Jack Posobiec prior to the wake, “The story here is that Trump gave a donation to Tunnels to Towers, I believe he paid off the mortgage for this family.”
Trump himself never claimed he would be donating to pay off Diller’s mortgage, but the lie quickly spread on social media following Zere’s interview. Students for Trump Chair Ryan Fournier posted, “[Trump] has a huge heart and I’ve seen it time and time again.”
Other MAGA accounts chimed in to praise the former President for his supposed act of charity for the fallen officer’s family, calling him a “man of the people” and saying “this is our President who cares.”
In reality, Tunnels to Towers Foundation, a non profit that provides “mortgage-free homes to Gold Star and fallen first responder families with young children, and [builds] specially-adapted smart homes for catastrophically injured veterans and first responders,” quickly announced it would be paying off Diller’s mortgage to provide relief for his family.
The charity put a button link for the public to donate to Diller’s mortgage on the home page of its website:
David Zere then issued a clarification, responding to a Tunnels to Towers post on X promoting their campaign for Diller’s family, saying he “may have been mistaken” about Trump donating to help Diller. However, other major accounts, like Fournier, at the time of writing have not taken down their posts crediting Trump, despite receiving a fact check from X Community Notes.
Neither Zere’s retraction, nor the Community Notes fact check can stop the spread of misinformation once it takes hold in the MAGA corners of social media. The image of Trump as the benevolent dear leader is strong in the minds of his supporters.
But as the family of slain Capitol Police Officer Brian Sicknick pointed out, Trump has spent the last year on the campaign trail praising January 6th insurrectionists who attacked police officers. In recent months he has taken to calling them “unbelievable patriots” and “hostages.”
Trump has said many times during this campaign that he is seeking immunity for police officers, just as he seeks it for himself. He claims that you just have to put up with the occasional “bad apple” or rogue president in order to allow them to properly do their jobs, which basically means he believes they and he should be able to defy the law if, in their judgment, it’s what they need to do. In other words, it’s not just immunity he seeks for Trump and police, it’s also impunity. With his promises of pardons for the J6 criminals on day one of a new presidency, it appears he now wants the same for his followers
If Trump once again incites his followers if he loses the election (which I think is very likely) there may very well be plenty of police who fight on their side this time. That’s undoubtedly in the back of his mind these days when he stages a performance as he did at that funeral last weekend.