Ever since social media has been a part of the way we report and comment on news, new ideas and jokes can be spread all over the internet practically overnight. A lot of these come from viewers live-tweeting major news events, and if you've been on Twitter recently, you've most certainly a cornucopia of tweets about the presidential debates, most of them jokes about Trump or Hillary's speaking mannerisms. The debates just inspired a brand new and incredibly popular hashtag; #TrumpBookReport. The twitter user who inspired the hashtag was Antonio French, a St. Louis alderman who recently announced his candidacy for mayor. While watching and live-tweeting the third presidential debate, he tweeted, "Trump's foreign policy answers sound like a book report from a teenager who hasn't read the book. 'Oh, the grapes! They had so much wrath!'"
Agreement from other Twitter users started flooding in, including one tweet which French retweeted, by user @eddyapplesauce. "Lemme tell you about the Lord of the Flies. He's a loser. If I'm the Lord, I'll have the best flies. The fliest flies." French retweeted it with the hashtag #TrumpBookReport, and quickly others began to pick it up.
According to French, it was his wife who came up with the hashtag. "She was sitting on the other end of the couch and she replied to me with that hashtag, and Twitter just took it from there," he is quoted as saying. "We stayed up until 1 a.m. just laughing at all the different tweets that were coming in."
French has gained thousands of Twitter followers as a result of the hashtag, and the story has been covered by several media outlets. The tweet seems to have struck the perfect combination of timing, humor, and relevance that makes a new internet craze.
Books referenced have included everything from the classics, to the American and British novels we all read in high school, to popular modern YA novels, but almost all them are hilarious.Most of them also contain Trump-isms that by now are pretty familiar, like "Believe me," "bigly," "Disaster.", and "I have the best __".
Even you're a Trump supporter, you have to admit these are pretty funny, and one of the most entertaining internet conversations to come out of the presidential debates. Every candidate, no matter how popular or unpopular they are, is bound to have some viral jokes about them immortalized by the time the race is over. Have you been tweeting the hashtag, or did it fly under your radar? What do you think a #HillaryBookReport would look like? This presidential race has certainly been a memorable one, for some great and some not-so-great reasons, but at least we've had some laughs along the way.