Truck driver Jesse Morgan thrust himself into the middle of the post-2020 election drama on Tuesday when he claimed at a press conference that he had unwittingly driven a truck full of suspicious mail-in ballots from New York to Pennsylvania ahead of Election Day. “I know I saw ballots with return addresses filled out,” said Morgan, who claims to work for a Postal Service contractor. “Thousands of them, thousands.” The appearance at a voter fraud event hosted by the right-wing Thomas More Center turned Morgan into the latest viral star on the Trumpist right. And, soon enough, his claims were being amplified by the president, his legal team, conservative groups unaffiliated with the campaign, and Trump supporters themselves all of whom have argued that nearly 300,000 bogus mail-in ballots were used in Pennsylvania, Morgan’s home state, to put Joe Biden over the top.
Video of Morgan’s speech on Twitter has been viewed more than 3 million times—helped along by a Trump tweet—while the president and his campaign have racked up more than 60,000 retweets on just their own posts about Morgan. Sean Hannity dutifully put Morgan on his show. Before he became a hero in MAGAworld, Morgan was an amateur ghost-hunter. Morgan’s first success came with a 2016 video about a “shadow person” living in his basement, from where he claimed to hear strange noises. “I will not raise my daughters in a place that is haunted,” Morgan declares in the video, dubbed “Shadow person caught on camera.”
