Back in July, President Donald Trump gave a speech decrying cans of soup as the key weapon for anarchists in America today. Last night the clip made its way over to Twitter where it was met with a mixture of hilarity, despair, and memes.
Trump’s soup spiel came during a meeting with the National Association of Police Organizations’ leadership. Key quotes from his anti-soup position include:
In cities across the nation, we’ve also seen police officers assaulted with bricks, rocks, bats, Molotov cocktails, frozen bottles of water.
Somebody said last night, one of the protesters — I saw it — he said, ‘It’s only water. How can water hurt you?’ Yeah, they don’t say it’s frozen, in a bottle the size of a football. And they throw it at the police. It’s unbelievable. ‘It’s water.
‘And then they have cans of soup. Soup. And they throw the cans of soup. That’s better than a brick because you can’t throw a brick; it’s too heavy. But a can of soup, you can really put some power into that, right?’
And:
And then, when they get caught, they say, ‘No, this is soup for my family.’ They’re so innocent. ‘This is soup for my family.’ It’s incredible.
And you have people coming over with bags of soup — big bags of soup. And they lay it on the ground, and the anarchists take it and they start throwing it at our cops, at our police.
And if it hits you, that’s worse than a brick because that’s got force. It’s the perfect size. It’s, like, made perfect.
And when they get caught, they say, ‘No, this is just soup for my family.’ And then the media says, ‘This is just soup. These people are very, very innocent. They’re innocent people. These are just protesters. Isn’t it wonderful to allow protesting?’
A lot of Twitter users were aggravated by Trump’s priorities and how he seems to think soup is a bigger threat than COVID-19 or AR-15’s.
Others went the satirical route, imagining a world wherein cans of soup are legislated the way guns are. Or aren’t.
And Seinfeld references were the order of the day, with lots of “No soup for you!” memes.
Goya also got a lot of attention, making it to the trending tags on Twitter, as people suggested throwing Goya cans instead of soup cans. It’s a reference to the Trump family’s enthusiastic support of Goya foods after the CEO expressed his support for Trump. There were a lot of cracks about Goya being the approved canned food missile.
