Veteran novelist Stephen King, known for his vocal disdain of Donald Trump, recently stepped on his own shoelaces after sharing what turned out to be a fake social-media post and then publicly chastising Trump for something that never happened.
On Sunday night, King took to X to lambaste Trump, tweeting:
“Trump says he won’t invite either team playing in the World Series to the White House. He can’t rise above his petty political concerns even for the great American game. If anything shows what a louse he is, that’s it.”
But almost instantly, users pointed out that the post King referenced was not from Trump’s official social-media accounts—it was a satirical spoof that had gone viral. Critics didn’t hold back:
“That. Was. A. Fake. Post. Seriously, do you enjoy being lied to?”
“You have been duped, yet again, Stephen. When will you learn to look before you leap?”
King threw his rhetorical punch, only to realize he was punching thin air.
If this were the first time it happened, we might chalk it up to genuine mistake. But this is not King’s first ride on the misinformation coaster. Just last month, he issued an apology after falsely claiming that conservative commentator Charlie Kirk had “advocated stoning gays to death.” King later admitted he had “read something on Twitter without fact-checking.”
It’s striking that someone who loudly condemned social platforms for a “flood of false information” when he left Facebook — saying he wasn’t “comfortable with the flood of false information that’s allowed in its political advertising” — should now be so quick to amplify one of those errors.
King’s animus toward Trump is well-documented. He has called the president “a horror story,” declared his own “fear for my country,” and made other highly charged criticisms of the President.
In this latest episode, King aimed to expose what he believed was Trump’s unwillingness to honor the national pastime by welcoming World Series champions to the White House. Instead, he became an unwitting poster child for the dangers of echo-chamber tweet-sharing without verifying the source.
