UPDATE, 2:20PM with additional reactions Donald Trump this morning re-tweeted a GIF (from a Twitterer who calls himself “fuctupmind”) in which Hillary Clinton is struck to the ground by the president’s errant golf ball.
The visually manipulated (i.e., fake) GIF (see it below) shows Trump swinging a golf club, then cuts to Clinton being hit in the back by the ball as she boards an airplane and stumbles.
The twitterer that Trump re-tweeted has previously posted untoward (to put it politely) messages like the one screen-grabbed today by Buzzfeed (“Please get rid of the Hasidic Jews. They are the worst people on the planet…”), and has accused Clinton of, among other things, having the “brown bottle flu” when she fell ill at a 9/11 tribute. He claimed that Black Lives Matter, transgender people and Antifa did nothing to help Hurricane Harvey victims because they were “too busy ruining everything.”
(By Sunday afternoon, the Twitter user had changed his profile name from mike@fuctupmind to cnnsucks@fucktupmind).
Despite a separate presidential tweet this morning proclaiming that he had “Important meetings and calls scheduled for today,” Trump found a few moments to retweet the hit-in-the-back GIF and a message that he “spoke with President Moon of South Korea last night. Asked him how Rocket Man is doing. Long gas lines forming in North Korea. Too bad!”
No word on whether the South Korean president got the Elton John reference, or whether Trump is a regular follower of @fuctupmind.
Over the course of Saturday and early Sunday, Trump uncorked 17 tweets and re-tweets, hardly the social media cool-down some predicted when John Kelly took over as his chief of staff over the summer.
The latest messages, especially the attempt at Three Stooges slapstick, didn’t go over well with some pundits and other critics.
Stephen King, with It storming the box office, tweeted that “Trump thinks hitting a woman with a golf ball and knocking her down is funny. Myself, I think it indicates a severely f*cked-up mind.”
“What’s your plan, little boy?,” Keith Olbermann tweeted. “Hit Kim Jong-Un in the back of the head with a golf ball?”
Walter Shaub, the former director of the U.S. Office of Government Ethics, tweeted, “The President of the United States just retweeted a video vignette that imagines him assaulting his political rival. The man is unfit.”
Neo-con David Frum noted, “When Kathy Griffin fantasized about doing violence to him, Trump demanded the whole nation share his outrage. Most did. And now…”
On the other side of the political spectrum, Mother Jones’ David Corn tweeted a simple “You are what you retweet.”
Here are the tweets, retweets and responses…
And a few others:
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