During Wednesday’s presidential debate, moderator Chris Wallace brought up some of Donald Trump’s previous statements on foreign policy:
Wallace: Let’s turn to Aleppo. Mr. Trump in the last debate, you were both asked about the situation in the Syrian city of Aleppo, and I want to follow up on that because you said several things in that debate which were not true, sir. You said that Aleppo has basically fallen. In fact there are—
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Trump: It’s a catastrophe. Have you seen it? Have you seen what’s happened to Aleppo?
Wallace: Sir, if I may finish my question. There are a quarter million people still living there and being slaughtered.
Trump: That’s right, and they are being slaughtered because of bad decisions.
Wallace: If I may just finish here. And you also said that Syria and Russia are busy fighting ISIS. In fact, they have been the ones who have been bombing and shelling eastern Aleppo, and they just announced humanitarian pause, in effect admitting that they have been bombing and shelling Aleppo. Would you like to clear that up, sir?
Read transcript with Trump’s full response.
21st ward alderman Antonio French wasn’t impressed by Trump’s answer: “It was just so frustrating how painfully unprepared Donald Trump was. Hillary Clinton knows the ins and outs of foreign affairs and Donald Trump was just kind of phoning it in. It was hilarious and sad at the same time.” It inspired French to tweet that some of Trump’s speech sounded as if it had been ripped from a poorly executed book report.
Word nerds of the world quickly followed suit, mashing together famous quotes from classic literature with Trump’s characteristic speaking style.
French, who rose to Twitter prominence during the 2014 Ferguson protests, has nearly 135,000 followers. When he used the hashtag #TrumpBookReport to bring these types of tweets together, the conversation took off.
Thousands of responses from around the nation flooded into the Twitter pipeline. Hours after the debate, the hashtag #Trumpbookreport was the most popular hashtag on Twitter—in front of #debatenight and #Debates2016.
To be fair, French did not create the concept or hashtag. The Twitter account @TrumpBookReport was created this past June, and the hashtag was used by Twitter user Daniel Morrison a month later, but neither occurrences gained much traction. (Morrison wrote a satirical blog post late Wednesday that offered advice on how to create a viral hashtag. His key tip? “Wait 3+ months until someone with way more followers than you has the same idea.”)
French’s handle was mentioned so many times in reference to #TrumpBookReport, he says the Twitter app on his phone was sometimes completely unusable.
But, he says, it’s worth it: “I think folks just needed a little levity. These debates have become so intense—and with the level of tension and frustration—I think people were really looking for a way to lighten the national mood.”
