Harry Potter author J.K. Rowling launched a Twitter tirade against President Donald Trump on Friday, July 28 sharing a deceptively edited video with millions of her fans.
Rowling hammered out a string of eight Tweets on Friday criticizing the president for not shaking the hand of a disabled boy during a press conference.
But the video Rowling based her insults on was edited. Below is the video Rowling posted on Twitter:
Meanwhile, Trump actually greeted the boy first, bending down to chat with him, and giving him more attention than anyone else in the crowd, as can be seen in the following clip.
“How stunning, and how horrible, that Trump cannot bring himself to shake the hand of a small boy who only wanted to touch the President,” Rowling wrote to her 11.4 million followers.
Rowling has not deleted her tweets or apologized despite evidence that Trump did not ignore the boy.
Twitter users expressed dismay that Rowling has not retracted her statements.
“As a father of a daughter in a wheel chair, @jk_rowling I demand you take back what you said about @POTUS and apologize to him,” wrote one user.
“Whatever you think of the man, she has still outright lied & used a disabled kid to demonise him, I am disabled, I don’t appreciate it,” wrote another.
Rowling’s outburst over the deceptively edited video is reminiscent of news reports, which have since proven false, that claimed that Polish first lady Agata Kornhauser-Duda did not shake Trump’s hand.
In that case, major media outlets, including The Washington Post, Time, Newsweek, and Daily News, used this partial clip of the greetings exchanged, deceiving their audiences:
Meanwhile, the full clip of the greetings the presidential families exchanged shows Trump shaking hands with Poland’s first lady.
In the full clip, Kornhauser-Duda maintains eye contact with Melania Trump before greeting her. The Polish first lady was also following protocol for the greetings where the heads of state greet each other first before greeting the first ladies.
