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Trump Accidentally Retweets Post Mocking Him And Fox News

BY May 19, 2020

When President Donald Trump retweeted a Monday evening post of a Fox News clip featuring him, he may not have realized the post wasn’t intended to be flattering or supportive. In fact, the account he retweeted is one of his more vocal critics on social media, and responded to the retweet with some pretty harsh insults. It also looks like the president’s retweet may have accidentally boosted the popularity of an account that is perpetually critical of him.

Trump hydroxychloroquine
[Photo by Doug Mills – Pool/Getty Images]

On Monday, Trump announced that he’d been taking hydroxychloroquine, despite medical warnings about the drug. Fox News anchor Neil Cavuto actually cut away from the live feed to warn viewers of the dangers of the drug. Since Fox‘s Laura Ingraham recently suggested that there was no reason not to try the drug, some viewers called out the contradiction.

A Twitter account called ‘The Hoarse Whisperer’ tweeted the clip of Cavuto’s warning, with commentary mocking the apparent contradictory reporting.

This part is no surprise — media loyalty has become highly partisan, and Trump’s detractors frequently mock how Fox covers his administration. The surprising part is that Trump then shared the post.

trmp retweets the Hoarse Whisperer
Screenshot via Twitter

Trump may have not realized the post was intended to mock Ingraham’s support of the medication, rather than Cavuto’s dire warning, or maybe he just shared the clip based on the chyron (“President Trump: I’ve taken hydroxychloroquine for about a week-and-a-half now”), without watching it and realizing that Cavuto wasn’t praising his words. Trump later retweeted a post deriding Cavuto for the criticism, adding, “Fox News is no longer the same….you have more anti-Trump people, by far, than ever before.”

However, he didn’t delete the previous post.

Across social media, people who are familiar with Hoarse Whisperer’s posting, or who read the post in question, expressed shock.

The briefest click through to the original poster’s feed would tell any reader that this was no Trump fan.

However, Trump’s moment of attention seems to have equaled a lot of moments of attention from his following. It’s not certain how many of The Hoarse Whisperer’s new followers are from Trump’s retweet, but an archive of the account from two weeks ago shows 249k followers, compared to the current 266.4k — an increase of more than seventeen thousand new followers.

Meanwhile, the Hoarse Whisperer took advantage of the moment to send a harsh message back to the president and his fans.

Trump often retweets clips of himself from news networks that tend to be supportive of him, including Fox. He clearly realized at some point that Cavuto was cautioning viewers against following Trump’s example in taking an unproven medication with risky side effects, since he later tweeted to complain about Cavuto being ‘anti-Trump.’ However, at the time of tweeting, it appears he may not have recognized that neither Cavuto nor The Hoarse Whisperer was praising the president.



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