In the run-up to the inauguration of President Joe Biden on January 20, an opener allegedly written by the mayor of a city in the San Francisco Bay Area has begun circulating again on social media. The piece defends Donald Trump’s ‘lack of decoration, dignity and statesmanship’ and praises the former president for ‘defeating the left using their own tactics’ and ‘fighting for America’. However, the words are incorrectly attributed to Dr. Marshall Kamena, an optometrist and former mayor of Livermore, California. They were written in 2017 by conservative columnist Evan Sayet.
Examples of postings that make this wrong allocation can be found here, here and here.
The allegation that Kamena wrote the op-ed already appeared on Facebook in July 2018 in a post that has since been shared more than 237,000 times (here). In the 24 hours prior to the publication of this Fact Check article on January 25, 2021, this post alone has been viewed more than 3.9 million times.
This headline was written by Conservative speaker Evan Sayet and was first published on July 13, 2017 on Townhall.com (here), which describes itself as ‘the # 1 Conservative website’ (townhall.com/aboutus). With the title “He fights”, the column refers to Trump as “America’s first wartime president in the Cultural War”.
The incorrect assignment of the column to Marshall Kamena appears to be from a now-deleted 2018 LinkedIn post from a user named Julian McCall. In this archive, McCall himself noted that the column was incorrectly attributed to Marshall Kamena by me.
Contrary to recent social media reports, Marshall Kamena has not been the mayor of Livermore, California – a city on the eastern edge of the San Francisco Bay Area – since 2011. His LinkedIn page (here) states that he was mayor from November 2001 to December 2011 and that he currently holds the post of mayor emeritus.
The City of Livermore’s official website said Kamena is being succeeded by John Marchand, who left office last December (here). Livermore’s current mayor is Bob Woerner (here).
As Yahoo noted in its fact-checking here, Kamena did not, as the posts claim, elect him mayor “on the democratic card, as he knew that a city in the Bay would never vote for a Republican.” the application sheet (here) the office of Livermore mayor is not biased.
Reuters could not reach Kamena for comment on the viral posts the column mistakenly attributed to him. Articles from other fact-checkers have unleashed the wrong award since 2018, including USA Today (here), PolitiFact (here) and Snopes (here).
VERDICT
Incorrectly attributed. This 2017-on-praise praising Trump was not written by Marshall Kamena, the former mayor of Livermore, California. It was written in 2017 by conservative columnist Evan Sayet.
This article was produced by the Reuters Fact Check team. Read more about our fact-checking work here.