Last weekend, Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump drew the ire of pundits and social media trolls when he asked rally attendees in Orlando, Florida to raise their right hands and pledge to vote for him. Many were incensed because, at first glance, it looked like the GOP front-runner was encouraging his supporters to make a Nazi-esque salute. He wasn’t, and when asked about it in subsequent interviews, Trump claimed to have not known about the problem until the media started asking him about it. Lots of the attention was paid to this issue (and whether or not it was an issue at all), but the panel discussions ultimately distracted everyone from the real issue: why one of Trump’s supporters was allowed to force his dog to do the salute.
The internet first caught wind of the defiant doggie when Politico published a Vine of the incident on Tuesday. Throughout the following few days, both the Vine and the original clip went viral as everyone who’d been too angry at Trump’s apparent anti-Semitism had their eyes open to yet another affront. A person forcing his canine companion to raise his (or her) right paw and pledge to vote for the Donald in the Florida Primary on March 15? It’s outrageous! (Mainly because dogs cannot legally vote in the United States, nor anywhere else in the world for that matter.)
By the time CNN aired corespondent Jeanne Moos’ short piece about the dog on Wednesday, everyone began to realize just how weird the fact that the news was reporting on this story was.
Did my eyes deceive me, or was there just a CNN segment about a dog who was forced to endorse Trump?
— Blake Hounshell (@blakehounshell) March 10, 2016
However, their initial dumbfounded reaction to the CNN report immediately gave way to the usual 24-hour-cable-news-social-media cycle of aggregation, followups and hot takes.
https://twitter.com/lukeoneil47/status/707994723353554946
Compulsion key part of Trump worldview >> CNN: 'Dog Reluctantly Takes Trump Pledge' @TPM https://t.co/4hpDm1v480
— Josh Marshall (@joshtpm) March 10, 2016
https://twitter.com/jesseberney/status/708004383267676160
Then again, considering the Trump campaign’s previous (albeit indirect) encounter with canine politics, it comes as no surprise that the media would be all over a Trump-cum-dog new story. The New York real estate mogul just has a way with pooches, it seems.
(Via CNN)