Misleading Photo of Trump and Melania at Grave Goes Viral, Deleted After Damage Already Done
Molly Jong-Fast is an author. It’d be kind of cruel to say that she’s best known for being the daughter of feminist author Erica Jong, but, well, sometimes the truth hurts.
In addition to being a novelist, she also writes on politics. She tries to keep it balanced, as you can see from her latest piece at the U.K. Independent: “I spent three days listening to a smoldering ash heap of Trumpian shills at CPAC. The GOP’s future looks even worse than we thought.”
So I’m guessing she doesn’t like President Trump. In fact, one look at her Twitter feed seems to evince an obsession with the man. Almost all of her tweets are political in nature, and when they’re not about Trump they’re about owning the cons … with an eye toward Donald Trump.
Unfortunately, this sort of monomaniacal tendency toward turning everything Donald Trump does into a moment of mockery and rage is a problem when you realize that it sometimes causes you to speak before you think. That ended up with a very embarrassing retraction from Jong-Fast — but not before the damage was done.
As you may remember, an outbreak of tornadoes earlier this month claimed 23 lives in Alabama. As the Montgomery Advertiser noted, this was more than twice the people killed by tornadoes in the United States in all of 2018.
The president and first lady went to Alabama to view the damage, including a visit to a memorial for the victims.
President Trump viewing the 23 crosses representing the 23 tornado victims. pic.twitter.com/TgqkWOXLu9
— Sally Pitts (@SallyPitts_WSFA) March 8, 2019
You would imagine this wouldn’t be a moment to try and “own” the president and his wife. And, according to Molly Jong-Fast, she didn’t quite know it was that kind of moment.
However, as you can see, things went very wrong somewhere along the line.
I deleted this tweet when I was told they were at a grave site. Thank you @Cameron_Gray for the heads up. pic.twitter.com/8I4Disq1lZ
— Molly Jong-Fast (@MollyJongFast) March 8, 2019
As you can imagine, even the apology inspired plenty of backlash:
That’s called cognitive laziness. Although in this case, maybe more ‘extreme cognitive laziness’
— Sharon (@DogsNSunshine) March 9, 2019
Pure class 👏🏻
— Gary (@LentzGary) March 9, 2019
Imagine being a writer so stupid/lazy as (a) not to understand this occasion, and (b) not be able to distinguish marital from martial
— Charles Crawford (@CharlesCrawford) March 9, 2019
Of course, the other half of the responses seemed to be liberals repeating the strange conspiracy theory that the Melania seen here was a body-double Melania, proof that there’s literally nothing in this cold, hard world that can’t be turned into an outbreak of Trump Derangement Syndrome.
Jong-Fast has recently appeared in the U.K. Independent so I’m going to assume she’s at least familiar, in passing, with the act of fact-checking.
When she saw this photo, did she think this might be a good time to find out what the provenance of it was? Did she think that there might have been some context behind it?
Those might have been things she wanted to find out before she tweeted this — as would most journalists. Especially on the left, given the lessons the Covington Catholic and Smollett cases have afforded, you would think that something which seemed to confirm her ingrained biases would deserve a second check. But, nope.
Then again, giving her spelling of “marital,” it seems that the origin of the photo wasn’t the only thing that went unchecked. But by the time the correction was issued and the tweet got deleted, the damage had already been done.
I doubt Jong-Fast minds.
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