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Donald Trump Makes A Brilliant PR Move Or A Grave Mistake With #AskTrump… Either Way, It’s A Riot

By Dustin Kemp
Published on: 23:30 PST, Sep 21, 2015

Starting at 9 p.m. last night, Donald Trump hosted a Twitter Q&A where he invited the public to pose to him whatever questions they wanted him to answer. Predictably, lots of Twitter users did not take the #AskTrump Q&A seriously and hilarity ensued… but was it truly a backfire, or were rebellious users playing directly into Trump’s hands?

As soon as Trump announced via Twitter that he would answer any questions thrown at him by the public, anyone who had been following his campaign could guess the Q&A would not be fulfilling. After all, the Donald is known for providing extremely ambiguous answers to any difficult policy-related question he faces, a quality that Jimmy Kimmel lampooned hilariously in the spoof Donald Trump campaign ad below.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-ep53vIAV9c

To be fair, a few of the questions asked of Trump were sincere. Not surprisingly, Donald gave his usual overly-generic responses to those questions, but they at least maintained the guise of professionalism.

Others asked questions that, while not related to Trump’s campaign, were polite and appropriate.

It is no great surprise, though, that the vast majority of responders did not take the Q&A seriously. The hashtag #AskTrump trended majorly last night among people looking to make a mockery of Donald, and some of the ways they came up with to do so were side-splitting funny. There are literally thousands of #AskTrump joke Tweets to choose from, but here are some of the funniest.

Unfortunately, Donald did not respond to any of the comedic Tweets.

According to a Tweet from Twitter itself, #AskTrump was the fifth most trending hashtag in the world just two hours after Trump posted his initial invitation.

Betty White even posted a Tweet with the #AskTrump hashtag saying that the Q&A session had been an obvious failure from the beginning.

Well, no, the hashtag certainly did not make Trump look better than he did previously, but it did give him a huge amount of free press, a point comedian Patton Oswalt pointed out in an insightful Tweet.

Oswalt raises the point that no press is bad press, and, for that reason, Trump actually came out on top. Judging by a picture Trump tweeted after the session wrapped up, he certainly seemed happy with the results.

Is Donald Trump reflecting positively on the #AskTrump debacle because his campaign just finished pulling of a very successful PR ploy? Or was #AskTrump a misstep on his part that Trump was just trying to play off like a good sport? Leave your thoughts in the comments section below.

[Image via Justin Sullivan]

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