Right-wing figures are latching on to an outlandish claim that Kamala Harris used a teleprompter to answer audience questions during a Univision town hall Thursday.
Fox News’s Sean Hannity, pro-Israel violence-funding billionaire Bill Ackman, and allegedly unwitting Russian propagandist Benny Johnson are among several MAGA pundits and influencers who have begun to claim that Harris must have been using a teleprompter to respond to audience questions, because one was visible on the set of her town hall.
Both Hannity and Ackman have since deleted their posts criticizing Harris—probably because a little digging quickly revealed the claim to be an obvious lie.
Enrique Acevedo, the town hall’s moderator, offered a helpful fact-check of the right-wing claims, given that he was the one actually using the teleprompter.
“The prompter displayed my introduction (in Spanish) and then it switched to a timer,” Acevedo wrote late Thursday on X. “Any claim to the contrary is simply untrue.”
Daniel Coronell, the president of Univision News, was also quick to shut down the right-wing chatter Thursday evening, resharing one of the conspiratorial posts on X with some crucial context.
“That’s not true. The teleprompter that displays a text written in Spanish was a support element for the town hall moderator. I can tell you this with first-hand knowledge because I was in charge of the television program,” Coronell wrote.
It makes sense that MAGAites are a little touchy about the whole teleprompter situation. Donald Trump has repeatedly claimed that he doesn’t use one—even when one is sitting right in front of him. In reality, Trump regularly uses a teleprompter, before veering wildly off-script into incoherent rambling he calls “the weave.”
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