Stephen King: ‘The News Is Real. The President Is Fake’

Horror novelist Stephen King continued his long-running social media attacks on President Donald Trump Sunday with a post to his Twitter account in which he called the president “fake.”

“The news is real. The president is fake,” the 69-year-old Dark Tower author wrote in a tweet Sunday that quickly racked up nearly 250,000 “likes” and more than 75,000 retweets.

The message was the latest barb King lobbed at Trump on Twitter this week; over the July 4 holiday, the author said the president makes him want to “blow lunch.”

Last month, King claimed that Trump had blocked him from reading his tweets on Twitter, and joked: “I may have to kill myself.”

King has been one of Trump’s most outspoken critics from the literary world; in May of 2016, the author signed on to an open letter along with more than 300 other writers —including Dave Eggers, Cheryl Strayed and Michael Chabon —blasting Trump’s then-candidacy for the presidency.

In a June 2016 interview with Rolling Stone, King said he was “disappointed in the country” for Trump’s apparent popularity during the presidential campaign.

“I think that he’s sort of the last stand of a sort of American male who feels like women have gotten out of their place and they’re letting in all these people that have the wrong skin colors. He speaks to those people,” King said at the time. He added that Trump appealed to people who “would like to have a world where you just didn’t question that the white American was at the top of the pecking order.”

In March, the author — whose Dark Tower series has been turned into a movie debuting this summer starring Idris Elba and Matthew McConaughey — wrote a short story using his Twitter account to take aim at Trump’s claim that he had been wire-tapped by former president Barack Obama before the election.

Of course, King is hardly the only celebrity to have called Trump a “fake” president. Just this week, singer Barbra Streisand penned an op-ed for HuffPost titled “The Fake President,” in which she called Trump an “angry, hollow vindictive man” and a “narcissistic fraud.”

 

Follow Daniel Nussbaum on Twitter: @dznussbaum