As he departed the 2019 G7 summit in France on Sunday, Donald Trump returned to his Twitter account, to make a curious claim about what he said was his chief topic of conversation with leaders of the world’s other industrialized democracies. That question, Trump alleged, had to do with one of his own favorite targets for Twitter attacks — the United States media.
“Mr. President, why does the American media hate your Country so much?” Trump claimed to be asked “most” by the other G7 leaders. “Why are they rooting for it to fail?”
The highly dubious claim came just a day after Trump posted on Twitter , in the midst of the G7 meetings, to agree with far-rightwing radio talks show host Mark Levin, writing, “The Media is destroying the Free Press! Mark Levin. So True!”
Trump has regularly attacked the media, usually in general, sweeping terms rather than critiquing specific media reports, throughout much of his term. He frequently refers to major media outlets such as The New York Times and CNN as “fake news,” and has even branded American media an “enemy of the people” as early as April of 2017, according to a Daily Beast report.
But whether leaders of countries such as Germany, France, Japan, Italy and others in the G7 share Trump’s dim view of U.S. media, as he seemed to claim, was seen as a questionable proposition to say the least — as Twitter users quickly pointed out.
“Literally no one believes that,” replied one Twitter user to Trump’s Sunday morning claim.
Sirius XM talk radio host Dean Obeidallah, on his own Twitter account, replied by telling Trump that the fellow world leaders he referenced in his tweet were nothing more than “voices in your head that keep talking to you.”
He then compared Trump to Tyler Durden, the main character in the 1999 film Fight Club , who, as the BBC explains, turns out to be a figment of the imagination in the mind of the film’s disturbed narrator.
Journalist Tony Posnanski on his Twitter account even doubted that the other world leaders addressed Trump by his title.
“Lol…like anyone calls you Mr. President, a******e,” Posnanski wrote.
Also in Trump’s Twitter replies, documentary filmmaker Jeremy Newberger pledged to “eat my laptop” if any other world leaders actually admitted asking Trump the anti-media question.
Comedian Nick Jay Pappas, on Twitter , speculated that Trump was actually asked a different question at the G7 summit.
“Actually, the main question they asked was, ‘did you know your zipper is down?’” Pappas wrote.
