Beyond the amusement involved in the world’s most powerful man being biffed in the gob by a giant mass of fluff on a stick there were some people who seemed to be taking the whole thing altogether too seriously.
“Where’s the secret service,” some of Trump’s supporters asked online as to how a person could get so close to him and clonk him with a large object.
Others wondered whether it could class as ‘assault on the president’, while some in the nether regions of social media cooked up a conspiracy that the boom mic might have been ‘laced with a poison’ or ‘infected with the next pandemic’.
They said that the ‘mic needs to be tested for all agents’ and suggested what sort of substances might be smeared on the recording equipment, with some of the more outlandish suggestions including ‘fentanyl, anthrax, herpes’.
Those fluffy things are boom mics, someone caught Trump in the face with one (BRENDAN SMIALOWSKI/AFP via Getty Images)
One person called for the reporter’s crew to be ‘arrested and all equipment seized and tested for biological weapons or poisons’, claiming that ‘this should be treated as an assassination attempt’.
Meanwhile, besides being clonked in the face by microphones Trump has been busy threatening to take Greenland once again despite them not wanting to be occupied by the US.
Trump also keeps talking about making Canada ‘our cherished 51st state’ against their wishes, and NBC reports that the US president has asked the military to come up with options for occupying the Panama Canal.
He’s also been throwing out more tariffs on Canada, Mexico, China, the UK and the EU as he seems intent on starting a trade war with friends, neighbours and rivals alike.Trump has also been ordered to rehire scores of workers who had been laid off as part of the cost cutting agenda he and Elon Musk had pursued.
A wayward boom mic seems like the least of people’s worries right now.