A short YouTube video of Donald Trump tackling a man whose head was “replaced” by a CNN logo has become the President’s most popular tweet since he won the election.
The July 2 tweet featured a decade-old clip from Trump’s WWE days showing him slamming WWE owner Vince McMahon. A CNN logo was crudely edited onto McMahon’s face. The video had been making the rounds on pro-Trump Reddit forum “The_Donald” for some time.
The tweet garnered over half a million “likes,” making it, by this measure, his most popular tweet since the election. Trump’s first tweet after the election night currently has nearly 626,000 likes.
Trump mostly uses Twitter to announce his agenda, accomplishments, and priorities. But he’s also been using it to fire back at his critics.
Trump has nicknamed a group of mainstream media organizations “fake news” accusing them of distorting the truth to attack him. He has specifically called out The New York Times, The Washington Post, NBC, CBS, and ABC. But his battle with CNN has been escalated the most, with Trump recently changing his nickname for them to “very fake news.”
CNN has had a rough time in recent months. Last week the nonprofit Project Veritas published three videos, in as many days, showing a CNN producer jokingly call the network impartial “in theory” and calling American voters “stupid as [expletive],” commentator Van Jones say that the network’s narrative about alleged collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia is “a big nothing burger,” and another producer say the Russia narrative is “mostly bull[expletive]” and only pushed by the network for ratings.
The three videos came right after CNN retracted a story about the Trump-Russia collusion theory. Three journalists who worked on the story resigned in the aftermath. The story claimed that President Trump associate Anthony Scaramucci is linked with a $10 billion Russian investment firm. CNN has since issued an apology to Scaramucci after he threatened to sue them for $100 million.
“So they caught Fake News CNN cold, but what about NBC, CBS & ABC? What about the failing @nytimes & @washingtonpost? They are all Fake News!” Trump tweeted on June 27.
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