It is not the first time that President Donald Trump tweets a meme made by one of his supporters, but the video of Democrats reacting to his State of the Union set to R.E.M's "Everybody Hurts" actually got pinned.
The video found itself pinned to the top of Trump's Twitter account on Friday afternoon, after the president signed a controversial spending bill and declared a national emergency on the US-Mexico border, drawing outrage from both Democrats and his own supporters.
Made last week, the video shows the long faces of prominent Democrats – among them Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Bernie Sanders, Adam Schiff, Kirsten Gillibrand, Nancy Pelosi, Chuck Schumer, and Kamala Harris – during last week's State of the Union address.
Vox, the liberal "explainer" outlet, swiftly denounced Trump's promotion of content from a "random Twitter account" as unpresidential.
Sure, this is funny — if, say, The Daily Show or Stephen Colbert does something like it. But for the president to tweet it, it's alarming.
People who have made it their mission to troll the US president on Twitter absolutely hated it – as did former R.E.M. member Mike Mills, who used rather salty language to demand Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey do something.
Mills tried to clarify later that his problem was with copyright infringement, not with the tweet's politics.
The author, a self-described "memesmith" who goes by the moniker Carpe Donktum, delighted in the attention, gaining thousands of followers on social media and announcing he would speak only to select journalists, while others are welcome to get into a "bread line starting in Venezuela."
Trump supporters loved the video, with Carpe getting endorsements from cartoonist Scott Adams and actor James Woods, as well as Trump 2020 campaign manager Brad Parscale.
It is not the first time the memesmith has used R.E.M's "Everybody Hurts." It was deployed to devastating effect in his May 2018 video featuring former Obama adviser Ben Rhodes trying to cope with Hillary Clinton's defeat in the 2016 presidential election.
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