A fake tweet, claiming to be a 2015 call from Donald Trump to shoot any president who oversaw a 1,000 point drop in the Dow Jones stock market index out of a cannon, went viral on Tuesday morning.
On Monday, financial markets globally suffered heavy losses, which saw the Dow Jones Industrial Average drop by 1,175 points, in its largest one-day points fall on record.
At first, Trump’s tweet appeared to be yet another painful contradiction of a previous statement by the US president.
However, author Shaun Usher quickly admitted it was a joke. It was too late: At the time of writing, Usher’s tweet has 21,000 retweets, and 43,000 likes, and continues to be posted by others as if it were genuine.
The tweet played on the internet meme of quoting Donald Trump’s old tweets in light of new developments, usually in order to mock the US president.
Shaun Usher is editor of popular Twitter page Letters of Note, which posts old letters, often between famous correspondents.
The doctored tweet, posted yesterday evening, said: “If the Dow Joans ever falls more than 1000 ‘points’ in a Single Day the sitting president should be ‘loaded’ into a very big cannon and Shot into the sun at TREMENDOUS SPEED! No excuses!”
It was intended to look as if Trump had posted the tweet back in 2015, with Usher captioning the screenshot: “There’s always a tweet.”
Usher has told media outlets that he felt the tweet was so preposterous that people would not possibly believe it was real, and it was indicative of the current climate that many people did.
Twitter users often dig through Trump’s old tweets to find statements he has made in the past that contradict his current stances.
One of the most famous examples of this is Trump’s incessant bashing of predecessor Barack Obama for playing golf.
Between 2011 and 2016, he tweeted at least 27 times about Obama playing golf while president.
Since taking office in January 2017, Trump has reportedly played golf 97 times. Each time a story emerges about Trump playing too much golf, Twitter uses delight in quoting Trump’s tweets back at him, in an effort to highlight his hypocrisy.
