Yesterday was the much-awaited testimony of former acting Attorney General Sally Yates and retired Gen. James Clapper before the Senate Intelligence Committee over Russia’s interference in the 2016 election. It was testimony the president firmly believes went in his favor, as he responded with a string of tweets calling the entire thing a charade and hoax.
It was also punctuated by his paraphrasing of Clapper’s testimony, which Trump believes should fully put the matter to bed.
Director Clapper reiterated what everybody, including the fake media already knows- there is "no evidence" of collusion w/ Russia and Trump.
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) May 8, 2017
If the president wanted people who visited his Twitter profile to see that tweet first, he could have “pinned” that tweet, a practice that allows Twitter users to put any one of their tweets front and center at the top of their profile page.
Instead, he had someone type out that statement and add it to a black box on his header photo, a Twitter engagement strategy practiced by …. no one.
(Full disclosure: It is the practice of this site (and several others) to include portions of tweets in photos for articles we post to social media as a way to increase click-through rates and tease an element of the story, but I don’t think that was something that was going through the mind of Trump’s social media team (him?) here, as page views are not a metric by which the presidency is measured. Or maybe it is. That would explain so much. But anyway, clicking that photo takes you to nowhere, so long story short ¯_(ツ)_/¯.)
Here it is optimized for mobile.
The whole thing is also funny because of the juxtaposition of every single person in the picture lustily giving a thumbs up to the former director of National Intelligence exonerating a sitting U.S. president for committing treason. And again, because Twitter’s very simple pinned tweeted feature allows you to do this without the need for Photoshop. And lastly, because Trump took as gospel the words of a man who has a history of sitting before Congress and misleading them.
Anyways, as is always done whenever Trump’s tweets provide something exploitable, users took a bevy of his old tweets and meme’ed them into the image.
https://twitter.com/pattymo/status/861752766229655552
https://twitter.com/pattymo/status/861749562955923456
Which, naturally, per the rules of internet reductiveness and derivativeness (not saying it isn’t funny, just that it’s expected), people then added @dril tweets to it.
https://twitter.com/ParkerMolloy/status/861751022565433344
https://twitter.com/ParkerMolloy/status/861755124556996608
Whether Trump realized what a massive L he was taking online is unclear, but as of this morning, the text over the header photo has been removed.