We were away for the weekend, so it was not until a few hours ago that I say this article in the New London Day about Trump’s visit to England. On line, the story is titled, appropriately, Protests, diplomatic backflips mark Trump’s visit to England. But I saw it first in the printed newspaper, where the title reads, weirdly, Trump on his best behavior in visit to England.
I think I’ve remarked before that the person who composes the headlines at The Dayoften gives things a right wing slant, but it looks a little like he or she has a colleague on the web side that doesn’t see things the same way.
Anyway, I was struck by the printed headline for a couple of reasons. First of all, I had kept up with the news enough to know that Trump managed to piss off about 99% of the people of Great Britain. In that, perhaps, he did something somewhat constructive, in that the English, the Scots, and the Welsh found common cause. I mean the man even found a way to be rude to the queen of England, and not in her capacity as the queen, but simply as a human being. So, in other words, I knew the headline was false from start to finish.
I was also a bit mystified. Was the headline writer being serious, or was he or she being artfully sarcastic?
The only reason one would point out that someone was on their “best behavior” would be because one has reason to expect bad behavior, something we really shouldn’t expect from the person holding the office the genius now holds. The article actually does use the phrase, but it appears to be a satiric use and, as a title, it hardly accurately summarizes the contents, the web version being far more accurate. So, there was the possibility that the intent was satiric.
On the other hand, the intent might have been to actually put a favorable spin on the story. After all, lots of people only read headlines and initial paragraphs, and you have to get to the second paragraph and beyond in this story to realize the magnitude of the disaster that was the genius’s visit to England. But if it was intended to be favorable to Trump, why use verbiage that would reflect well on a four year old, but not on a grown man?
This mystery may never be solved. It is a mystery we would never have needed to solve when Obama was president. I’ll even go so far as to say that there has never been a president whose “behavior” needed to be rated in this fashion.
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