How One Woman Scammed Her Way Into Big MAGA Bucks

From ELLE

A black college student in the Midwest who pretended to be a Trump supporter shunned by her family for her beliefs says she ended up collecting 150,000 MAGA bucks before being exposed as someone with good sense and moral character. Call it Operation Let’s Get That Stale Bread.

The woman, who gave the name Karen, posted her fictional plight under her Twitter handle, @chckpeas, with a picture of herself in a MAGA hat that she says she found outside. “I snapped a couple of pictures in it, before my head started burning... and threw it away,” she told ELLE.com.

Like many online tales of woe, Karen's story came with a link to a GoFundMe, which quickly collected what she reports as in the neighborhood of $150,000 from folks who thought they were paying an early adopter of the Blexit. While this is certainly the scam of the year, according to the woman it started as a joke. “I saw that other black girl that posted about being a black Trump supporter,” she said, “and I wanted to make fun of her.” Her tweet was shared over a thousand times throughout Unseasoned Twitter. Watching the GoFundMe explode with Confederate dollars, she says, was just an unexpected bonus.

“[The Republican Party] needs black faces,” the Twitter prankster reasoned, “so they throw money at any black person that says they support Trump so that people stop thinking of them as the 'racist party' But it’s never going to happen.” Who needs coffee to wake up when there’s tea this hot? “They also fail to realize that they don’t have to outwardly hate black people to be racist, because they still create policies and laws that keep black people poor and unsupported. Especially the three strikes law that they love to uphold, and it does nothing but send poor black and brown people to jail for the rest of their lives. But we’re supposed to ignore that and say that suddenly they’re not racist because they paid a black girl’s tuition? It’s laughable.”

When Dog Whistle Twitter started to suspect the Elizabeth Jennings of Resistance was not who she seemed, the GoFundMe was shut down, but not before she could cha-cha slide away with the loot like the Hamburglar at a drive-through. “The Trumpies saw my old tweets about Obama and realized maybe I might have been lying. But I was faster and took everything before it could be taken from me.” We stan a hasty check-cashing legend.

But just as quickly as the coins jumped in, the racism jumped out.

"Yes, people haven’t hesitated to call me racial slurs, say that I’m just a 'welfare bitch' and not even in school, people telling me I’m going to jail (I’m not, my lawyer says I’m 100% okay), but there’s also overwhelming support and people that stan me which really cancels out the hate.” Well, that and enough money to pay for a few semesters of college, which is where she said it was going. It seems, at least today, Lock Her Up Twitter managed to assuage one person's economic anxiety.

Like many viral stories in the age of Resistance, this seems potentially too good to be true. The erstwhile MAGA icon also spoke to New York Magazine, giving the name Quran, and told them that she'd returned most of the money because she felt bad. So, did the scammer scam the scammed or was the scam inside us all along? Either way, it is a perfect hustle for these truth-bereft times.

Was it all a political stunt or a gag gone right? Both, she says. “Voting is coming up so I just wanted to remind people that Republicans are stupid and shouldn’t hold the majority anymore.” Oh yes, there’s a thesis behind these Robin Hood antics. “Minimum wage is pathetically low and it’s not a living wage either so how are we supposed to survive? And then the people who say 'go to college and get a better job' like anyone can afford that, and it won’t guarantee you a job either.”

Whether she's walking away with a fat stack of tax-free Blexit bucks or just a brief blip of internet infamy, Karen the scammer seems happy to have made a point. "Imagine if the Republicans had [put as] much energy into actually helping this country and not lining the pockets of the filthy rich as they do getting their racist image washed," she said through Twitter DM, as she either floated away on her yacht off the coast of Bermuda or went about her day as a college student studying art history. She added, "Be sure to tell them we need to vote."

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