Donald Trump tweeted a quote from Italian fascist leader Benito Mussolini early Sunday morning, and defended the action on NBC's Meet the Press.
The tweet was actually a re-tweet from "Il Duce 2016," which is a parody account that does nothing but tweet Mussolini quotes while attributing them to Trump, using his actual Twitter handle.
The fake account tweeted, "It is better to live one day as a lion than 100 years as a sheep," around 5:45 a.m., and Trump re-tweeted it within the hour.
When "Meet the Press" host Chuck Todd asked the GOP front runner during an interview later Sunday morning if he knew it was a Mussolini quote when he sent it out, Trump said, "It's okay to know it was Mussolini. Look, Mussolini was Mussolini. It's okay to-- It's a very good quote. It's a very interesting quote. And I know-- I saw it. I saw it. I know who said it. But what difference does it make? Whether it was Mussolini or somebody else, it's certainly a very interesting quote."
When Todd followed up by asking, "Do you want to be associated with a fascist?", Trump responded, "No, I want to be associated with interesting quotes. And people-- You know, I have almost 14 million people between Instagram and Facebook and Twitter and all of that, and we do interesting things."
"Certainly, it got your attention, didn't it?" he added.
Later on Sunday, Gawker - a gossip blog focusing on celebrities and the media industry - posted a story claiming to be behind the "il duce" parody account, saying they had created it with the explicit purpose of trying to trick Trump into re-tweeting a Mussolini quote.
