It appears that not even death can stop former presidential candidate and businessman Herman Cain from posting tweets in support of his good friend Donald Trump. On Wednesday night a post taking aim at newly selected VP pick Sen. Kamala Harris and former Vice President Joe Biden sent Twitter into a frenzy exactly two weeks after Cain’s COVID-19 related death.
“Just in case you thought Biden’s candidacy was going to be anything other than completely nuts,“ Cain’s tweet reads, “team Trump has released a new video.” The post links to commentary on hermancain.com that criticizes Biden for his gaffes and praises a new Trump ad that suggests the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee is a racist.
The tweet drew both criticism and satire from people amused by the idea that a deceased man was still posting on social media. By Thursday morning the post was ratioed, with close to 25K comments mostly attacking the tweet.
“Uhhhhhhhh, aren’t you dead?” comedian David Alan Grier wrote in response. That tweet received nearly the same amount of likes as the original attack. Outside of jokes, Twitter users also questioned the platform’s rules on a dead person’s account being used for political propaganda. And others were simply disgusted by the fact that somebody would want to use the account to push such a narrative.
On August 11, Cain’s daughter, Melanie Cain Gallo wrote a message to the deceased businessman’s supporters saying the work her father did with his website will not end with his passing: “We’ve decided here at Cain HQ that we will go on using this platform to share the information and ideas he believed in. He often talked about the site going on once he was ready to step away from it. We had hoped he could enjoy reading it in his retirement, but he made it clear he wanted it to go on.”
The family clearly went on using his Twitter profile as well. Criticism about the decision may have pushed holders of the account to be more forthright about who was tweeting. On Thursday morning Herman Cain’s name was replaced with “The Cain Gang.” The avatar for the account reflected the same name, a departure from the profile shot of Herman Cain that remained on Wednesday night when the tweet was originally posted.