Sunday morning, the President of the United States posted a wrestling meme, which is apparently just a thing that happens in a country where Idiocracy turned out to be wishful thinking. The meme was drawn from one of Trump’s old WrestleMania appearances, in which the future Commander-in-Chief (and, clearly, his double) pummeled pro wrestling kingpin Vince McMahon. In the gif, McMahon’s head is replaced by the CNN logo.
The President pinned his tweet, because he is a clever boy. (He had previously pinned this little gem: “I am thinking about changing the name #FakeNews CNN to #FraudNewsCNN!” So it’s nice that you can no longer tell his tweets from those of his followers.)
Anyway, in a world where authoritarian leaders routinely torture and kill journalists, and in a country where a member of Trump’s party literally body-slammed a reporter on the eve of an election (which he still won, hahahaha where’s the arsenic), and in a White House where Deputy Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders insisted – less than 72 hours earlier! – that the President had “in no way, form or fashion has ever encouraged violence, quite the contrary,” there was nothing troubling about the President’s Saturday morning dispatch, no siree Bob. But there was one question to ponder: where on earth did this thing come from? It’s not like the 71-year-old president, whose iPhone reportedly has exactly one app (Twitter, of course), spent his Saturday morning making a gif. Which poor schmuck on his social media team did?
Well, funny story: turns out it was a racist, xenophobic, anti-Semitic dude on Reddit.
The Washington Post reports that the source of the altered animation appears to be a post by a user branded with the Wilde-level nom de plume “HanAssholeSolo” on The_Donald, a wildly popular and weirdly sycophantic subreddit where users post images and memes that treat Trump like some kind of mid-‘90s Teen Beat cover boy.
“Congratulations /u/HanAssholeSolo,” remarked a fellow traveller, shortly after the tweet in question, “your dankery has been tweeted by the President of the United States.” The user confirmed it shortly thereafter: “Holy shit!! I wake up and have my morning coffee and who retweets my shitpost but the MAGA EMPORER himself!!! I am honored!!”
And what kind of a guy is “HanAssholeSolo,” dare you ask? Oh, y’know, just a guy who casually drops “nigger” into posts all the time, creates memes targeting Jewish members of the media, and brags about visiting foreign countries armed with “punch blades” for the express purpose of stabbing Muslims. As Trump loves to say, he only selects the best people. (Side note: one of the journalists who discovered those posts has now himself become a target of threats and hate speech. Everything is fine.)
Oh by the way, after posting the white supremacist’s meme, the President then retweeted it from the official @POTUS account, just to make it clear that this is an official statement by the President, and worthy of preservation. So now “HanAssholeSolo”’s work is in the National Archives. How’s everybody feeling about representative democracy, good?