Trump's CNN Wrestling Tweet Was Born on Reddit

After going on a tweeting tirade Saturday night against the media, President Donald Trump had apparently not calmed down by Sunday morning, when he posted a meme in which he body slams Vince McMahon with CNN’s logo on his head.

This latest aggression follows a roller coaster of a week in which Trump lashed out for days at Morning Joe hosts Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinksi over their coverage of him. The tweets lead to the pair writing an op-ed in the Washington Post Friday in which they allege the White House has attempted to blackmail them to stop criticizing the President and that he’s mentally unfit for office.

While Saturday’s tweets calling CNN the “fraudulent news media” were packed with vitriol, Sunday’s meme is still pretty next level. It’s based on footage from Trump’s appearance on Wrestlemania XXIII in 2007 — a video that has been watched on Youtube over four million times.

According to Breitbart, the video in question is edited a lot by Trump supporters to show the president tackling his various opponents. In this case it’s CNN — perhaps Trump’s top fixation in his fight against the media’s critical coverage of his administration.

The video appears to have originated within the infamous Reddit forum The_Donald, the foremost online space for Trump supporters to congregate.

The specific thread showing the meme quickly diverges into alternate reality takes in which Vince McMahon is the president, and “press secretary Scott Steiner takes ‘press beatings’ very literally,” according to one poster.

There are probably two things worth unpacking here while you try to climb back out of this internet k-hole. One: the more you think about it, a world in which WWE wrestlers are running the country doesn’t actually feel that unrealistic anymore. And two: a president inciting violence against the media once seemed about as likely as a president tweeting content from a hate speech-ridden Reddit forum. Both have now basically happened.