The story behind 'Jews for Trump'

In November, The New Yorker published a short profile of "Jonah Rich," a "Jew for Trump" who claimed he had attended some 20 rallies in support of the president. "This was good material," HuffPost's Luke O'Brien wrote this week. "Too good, it turned out. Within days, the Rich article had disappeared from The New Yorker’s site. (It’s preserved here.) Eventually, editors put up a note stating that 'the interview subject had misrepresented himself, and the piece was removed.'" O'Brien had dealt with the hoaxer, one Jonathan Lee Riches, before. So he wrote about it — and we asked him about what he found.

How did this story come about?

Riches contacted me after the New Yorker published their fake story. I wrote a profile of him for Details magazine in 2012. He was filing scores of nutty, frivolous lawsuits. He once sued Steve Jobs for using O.J. Simpson as a hit man, after which a judge wrote that Riches' complaint read “like a cross between Billy Joel’s ‘We Didn’t Start the Fire’ and a Dr. Bronner’s soap label...if Dr. Bronner had been a first-year law student with untreated paranoid schizophrenia.”

What was the hardest part of reporting, writing or editing the piece?

Dealing with the New Yorker's reflexive PR defensiveness, which forced me to do a lot of additional reporting to ensure that Riches also wasn't trying to hoax me.

What did you find most surprising?

That anyone could fall for a guy wearing a Jews For Trump shirt, a sky-blue yarmulke and janky sweatpants at a Trump rally.

What do you want readers to take away?

We should all be skeptical. Propagandists and trolls are everywhere trying to spread disinformation.

There's lots more, including an interview with Riches himself, on the site. Read on!

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