Article Lead Image

Photo via Gage Skidmore / Flickr Remix by Max Fleishman

Increasingly desperate Donald Trump declares himself ‘MR. BREXIT’

You can't give yourself a nickname.

 

Jay Hathaway

Internet Culture

Posted on Aug 18, 2016   Updated on May 26, 2021, 5:48 am CDT

Donald Trump, the inside-out cantaloupe who ostensibly wants to be the next president of the United States, recently shook up his campaign staff, reducing the role of manager Paul Manafort and bringing on a team from Breitbart News. In the process, he seems to have retaken the reins of his Twitter account. For better or for whatever this is: 

Trump (who likely wrote this tweet himself, as it came from an Android phone) wants to hitch his wagon to the British conservatives who wanted Britain out of the European Union, even though many of those conservatives instantly regretted their votes. Cool.

What is Trump trying to say here? It seems that now that he’s down in the polls and could lose states like Arizona and Georgia, he’s asking people not to count him out. After all, Brexit looked certain to fail as late as five hours before the vote, but it somehow ended up passing.

https://twitter.com/SopanDeb/status/766319920267333633

The problem with that analogy, though, is that—as the New York Times reports—the predictions that Britain would remain were based on an optimistic misreading of poll data, and they were complicated by a large number of undecided voters. 

Only 7 percent of U.S. voters are undecided about the presidential election, and predictions that Trump will lose in a rout are based on polls that are pretty hard to misread.

Which polls? “All of them.” 

So, just as Brexit didn’t come off the way Leave voters hoped, the whole Mr. Brexit thing isn’t being read the way Trump probably intended.

Ah, hmm, yes, there are those factors to consider. 

And also, jokes. So many jokes. 

https://twitter.com/edgarwright/status/766306815789457408

https://twitter.com/ditzkoff/status/766251442931953664

Despite the longstanding informal rule that you can’t give yourself a nickname, this one might just be dumb enough to stick.

Share this article
*First Published: Aug 18, 2016, 3:23 pm CDT