Troller-in-Chief: Trump Mocks Democrats SOTU Reaction With ‘Everybody Hurts’ Video

 

President Donald Trump, a.k.a. the commander-in-chief, a.k.a. the leader of the free world, used his vast and powerful sphere of influence to share a video designed solely to mock his Democratic Congressional foes.

Early Friday afternoon after, and shortly after a Rose Garden speech in which he declared a National Emergency at the southern US Border to release border wall funding (and oddly admitting that it was something that he didn’t need to do,) President Trump shared the following video produced by Twitter user @Carpedonktum.

The video (which you can watch above) depicts dour reactions of Democratic Congressional members (and Sen. Mitt Romney (R-UT)!) during his State of the Union speech and is set to the tune of Everybody Hurts, the R.E.M. single from Automatic for the People which was released in 1992. Given the political leanings of the members of R.E.M., it’s difficult to imagine this video staying up long due to rights issues.

What is really going on here? Why would the President share such a video?

Well, one theory is that the freestyle Rose Garden speech was largely criticized for being disjointed and close to unintelligible. At one point Trump said “You put up a barrier, the people come in and that’s it. They can’t do anything unless they walk left or right and they find an area where there is no barrier and they come into the United States.” That is an exact quote.

Cable news reaction has been pretty predictable, but the celebration and praise one might expect to see on Fox News and from other pro-Trump media outlets has been remarkably muted.

So what better way to change the conversation than to tweet a video designed to mock and ridicule one’s political foes?

President Donald Trump is a divider, not a unifier.

Watch above.

UPDATE –– 2/16, 10:27 am ET: As of now the video is not available on Trump’s Twitter page and per CNBC, people who tried watching it earlier today saw a message that it was removed “in response to a report from the copyright holder.”

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Colby Hall is the Founding Editor of Mediaite.com. He is also a Peabody Award-winning television producer of non-fiction narrative programming as well as a terrific dancer and preparer of grilled meats.