“President Trump is wise like an owl,” Tomi Lahren declared in a message to the US president’s Indian supporters. The conservative political commentator’s praise, however, quickly took a left turn: “Or as you guys would say in Hindi… wise like an ullu.”

Lahren’s translation of the word owl was spot on, but the 28-year-old seemed to be unaware that the Hindi word ullu is often associated with someone who is an idiot or dimwitted.

The inadvertent insult, however, was not a mere slip-up. Lahren was apparently tricked into calling Trump a dimwit – for $85.

After the video predictably went viral, comedian Ali-Asghar Abedi, a British-American of Indian descent, claimed on Twitter that he was the one who “pranked Tomi Lahren” through Cameo, an app that allows people to pay public personalities to say anything they are told.

Writing in The Independent, Abedi revealed that he “waged $85 that a prominent Trump supporter wouldn’t bother researching” what the term meant. “Best $85 I’ve ever spent,” he wrote. “That’s right – Tomi sold out, albeit unknowingly, for just $85.”

The comedy writer, who is based in New York, admitted the prank was “juvenile”, and urged people not to pick on the right-wing commentator since “it could have been any other pro-Trump commentator who fell naively into such an obvious trap”.

So why did he do it?

Given that the Republican National Convention seems to have crossed the boundaries of satire, he explained, “pranking the likes of Lahren may be one of the few ways we can derive comedy from this absurd event. After all, the RNC has been reduced to a cast of caricatures that closely resembles a comic book convention for villains only.”

Lahren reportedly uploaded the video to her social media accounts on August 26, but it has since been deleted and the political commentator hasn’t said anything on the issue.