# Post x_372684121484840960 - Post ID: `x_372684121484840960` - Platform: X (Twitter) - Posted: 2013-08-28T11:36:33.000Z (UTC) - Deleted: no - Repost: no, but it quotes a tweet by @not_that_actor - Canonical URL: https://trump.fm/post/x_372684121484840960 - Analysis page: https://trump.fm/post/x_372684121484840960/analysis - Audio narration: https://static.trump.fm/audio/x_372684121484840960.mp3 (a synthesized voice reading the post text, not a recording) ## Post text _Quotes @not_that_actor, pasted in quotation marks the way early X retweets were made by hand. The words in quotation marks are @not_that_actor's, not his; a reply of his, if any, follows the closing mark._ > "@not_that_actor: @realDonaldTrump Col Peters is right. When our adversaries r at war w each other, Assad regime+ Al Q, stay out of it! ## Engagement - Likes: 22 - Reposts: 49 - Replies: 0 - Views: unknown - Metrics collected: 2026-01-31T23:43:13.283Z (UTC) # Analysis _Machine-generated by trump.fm on 2026-02-25T21:54:52.639Z (UTC): a model's reading of this post, not his words. Its psychological terms describe the language, not a clinical assessment of him._ ## Post Analysis: August 28, 2013 — Syria Non-Intervention Retweet ### Overview This post is a verbatim retweet of @not_that_actor, who endorses the position of Lt. Col. Ralph Peters (retired U.S. Army officer and Fox News analyst) that the United States should abstain from the Syrian conflict because adversaries — Assad's regime and Al Qaeda-affiliated groups — are fighting each other. The post contains **no original Trump text**, significantly constraining psychological inference. Its primary analytical value lies in what Trump *chose to amplify* at a specific geopolitical inflection point. **Critical context:** Posted August 28, 2013 — exactly one week after the Ghouta chemical attack (August 21, 2013), the same day UN weapons inspectors came under sniper fire attempting to access the attack site, and the same day Secretary of State Kerry issued his strongest public warning yet about Syrian chemical weapons accountability. The Obama administration was actively deliberating military strikes. Trump's retweet constitutes a real-time, public policy intervention against that trajectory. --- ### Authorship Attribution **Local time:** 11:36 AM UTC = **7:36 AM EDT** (Trump in New York, August 2013). Early morning, within Trump's known active-posting window but also early business hours. Pure retweets with no added commentary were a consistent feature of Trump's early Twitter practice and were frequently self-executed. The absence of original language makes stylometric fingerprinting impossible. The timing marginally favors authentic posting. Confidence: **medium**. --- ### Narrative Identity (Level 3) Even without original text, the *selection* of what to retweet constructs narrative identity. In conjunction with the same-day post — *"As I predicted long ago, the war in Iraq was a disaster"* — Trump is assembling a coherent **prophetic realist** protagonist role: the outside voice who saw through interventionist consensus, was right about Iraq, and continues to be right about Syria. The retweet functions as **redemption-sequence pre-positioning**: if Obama intervenes and it goes badly, Trump has established himself on record as the prescient voice of restraint. The contrasting other is the Obama/Kerry foreign policy establishment moving toward military action. --- ### Characteristic Adaptations (Level 2) **Agency motives dominant.** Trump borrows Peters' military-expert credibility to validate a pre-existing position, building status as a serious foreign policy voice. This is consistent with his broader 2013 pattern of using RT-as-endorsement to amplify agreement without expending original argumentation. **Supply-seeking / maintenance trigger.** No evidence of narcissistic injury or reactive emotion. This is routine audience-building and position-reinforcement posting. --- ### Rhetorical Analysis - **Appeal to military authority** (Lt. Col. Peters): outsources credentialing to a named expert - **False equivalence**: Assad's regime and Al Qaeda-affiliated groups are treated as symmetrically threatening adversaries best left to neutralize each other — eliding the chemical weapons dimension driving the actual debate - **RT-as-endorsement**: position-taking with plausible distance from the specific framing - **Implicit appeal to war fatigue**: the "stay out" argument resonates with an audience exhausted by post-9/11 interventionism --- ### Clinical Assessment This post does not reach clinical significance threshold. It is a pure retweet with no original content, from Trump's **baseline period** for longitudinal analysis. No rage, malignant features, gaslighting, or danger indicators are present. The non-interventionist position expressed was mainstream within paleoconservative and realist foreign policy circles in 2013. --- ### Longitudinal Note August 2013 represents early-baseline Trump Twitter behavior: retweeting supporters and Fox News-adjacent figures, building a foreign policy brand, and laying the "I was right" narrative that would become central to his 2016 campaign. This specific Syria non-intervention position was later cited by Trump as evidence of foreign policy foresight during the campaign. ## Fact Verification | Claim | Verdict | Evidence | |-------|---------|----------| | "Assad regime and Al Qaeda-affiliated groups were adversaries fighting each other in Syria in August 2013" | **True** | By mid-2013, Jabhat al-Nusra (Al Qaeda's Syrian affiliate) and other jihadist factions were engaged in active combat against Assad's forces. The characterization of Assad and AQ-aligned groups as mutual adversaries was factually accurate for this period, though the groups' relative threat profiles and the chemical weapons context complicate the strategic inference drawn. | | "Col. Ralph Peters publicly advocated a 'stay out' / non-intervention policy on Syria at this time" | **Unverifiable** | Peters was a regular Fox News analyst who commented extensively on Syria in 2013. His stated positions on Syria varied across appearances. The specific claim that he clearly advocated pure non-intervention at this moment cannot be verified from the post alone without access to the specific broadcast segment referenced by @not_that_actor. | Overall Veracity: 75% ## Authorship Analysis **Uncertain** (score: 65%) ### Indicators - Posted at 7:36 AM EDT — within Trump's documented early-morning Twitter window - Pure retweet with no original text prevents stylometric fingerprinting - RT-only posts were common in Trump's early Twitter practice and frequently self-executed - Content directly aligns with Trump's personally-held, repeatedly-stated Syria non-intervention position - No polished event-announcement formatting typical of aide-generated posts ## Psychological Profile ### State **Grandiose State** **Trigger:** Maintenance (Obama administration's escalating interventionist signals on Syria; Kerry statement day-of) Sentiment: -0.15 ### Clinical **Malignant Narcissism:** - Narcissistic: 10% - Antisocial: 5% - Paranoid: 5% - Sadism: 0% **Defense Mechanisms:** - rationalization (neurotic) **Cognitive Complexity:** - Complexity: 35% **Parasocial Techniques:** - Retweeting a supporter to signal shared community identity around non-interventionism - Borrowing military expert credibility (Col Peters) to validate pre-existing position without expending original argumentation ## Fact Checks (2) _The model's verdicts from 2026-02-25._ > Assad regime and Al Qaeda-affiliated groups were adversaries fighting each other in Syria in August 2013 **TRUE** By mid-2013, Jabhat al-Nusra (Al Qaeda's Syrian affiliate) and other jihadist factions were engaged in active combat against Assad's forces. The characterization of Assad and AQ-aligned groups as mutual adversaries was factually accurate for this period, though the groups' relative threat profiles and the chemical weapons context complicate the strategic inference drawn. > Col. Ralph Peters publicly advocated a 'stay out' / non-intervention policy on Syria at this time **UNVERIFIABLE** Peters was a regular Fox News analyst who commented extensively on Syria in 2013. His stated positions on Syria varied across appearances. The specific claim that he clearly advocated pure non-intervention at this moment cannot be verified from the post alone without access to the specific broadcast segment referenced by @not_that_actor. Overall Veracity: 75% ## Tags - Syria (90%) - non-intervention (85%) - retweet (100%) - baseline_period (80%) - military_authority_appeal (65%) - supply_seeking (35%) - prophetic_realist_narrative (70%) ## That day _From trump.fm's machine-generated digest of the day, not his words._ **On MLK's Anniversary, Trump Quietly Builds the MAGA Blueprint While Dehumanizing Syrian Rebels** A busy but emotionally flat day of 34 posts, mostly spent replying to fans and retweeting praise. The most notable moments came when Trump appropriated Martin Luther King Jr.'s "I Have a Dream" phrasing to push an early version of his "Make America Great Again" message — on the exact 50th anniversary of the speech. He also claimed he predicted the Iraq War would be a disaster (he didn't), dismissed the $40 million Trump University fraud lawsuit as "ridiculous," and warned that Syrian rebels all "want to fly planes into our buildings." No anger or meltdowns — just steady brand construction with a few dark edges. Full digest for 2013-08-28: https://trump.fm/date/2013-08-28/analysis ## Citation - APA: Trump, D. J. (2013, August 28). "@not_that_actor: @realDonaldTrump Col Peters is... [Social media post]. X (Twitter). trump.fm. https://trump.fm/post/x_372684121484840960 - MLA: Trump, Donald J. ""@not_that_actor: @realDonaldTrump Col Peters is right...." X (Twitter), 28 Aug. 2013. trump.fm, https://trump.fm/post/x_372684121484840960. Accessed 9 Oct. 2026. - Chicago: Donald J. Trump, ""@not_that_actor: @realDonaldTrump Col Peters is right....," X (Twitter), August 28, 2013, archived at trump.fm, https://trump.fm/post/x_372684121484840960. ## For agents - Site overview: https://trump.fm/llms.txt - API specification: https://trump.fm/openapi.json - MCP server: https://trump.fm/mcp (search and fetch tools, no auth) - This post as JSON: https://trump.fm/api/posts/x_372684121484840960 - Analysis as JSON: https://trump.fm/api/analysis/x_372684121484840960 - All citation formats: https://trump.fm/api/cite/x_372684121484840960 - Same day: https://trump.fm/date/2013-08-28 - The record alone, without the analysis: https://trump.fm/post/x_372684121484840960.md?analysis=false _Markdown view of a trump.fm page. Post, analysis, date, feed, contradictions, search and about pages answer in markdown at their URL with `.md` appended (`/index.md` for the home page), or when sent `Accept: text/markdown`._