Paris resident’s ‘fact check’ of Trump tweet goes viral
A Facebook message by a French woman picking apart a tweet from US President Donald Trump about the recent attack on soldiers near the Louvre museum in Paris has been shared hundreds of thousands of times within days of posting.
In the aftermath of Egyptian Abdullah Reda Refaie al-Hamahmy’s machete attack on soldiers in a shopping mall near the Louvre, the president tweeted that the famous museum had been attacked.
A new radical Islamic terrorist has just attacked in Louvre Museum in Paris. Tourists were locked down. France on edge again. GET SMART U.S.
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) February 3, 2017
Parisian Egie Wild responded to Trump on Facebook to “thank him for his concern” and to point out several points she saw as inaccuracies in his statement.
First of all she noted that the attack wasn’t in the Louvre, but at a nearby shopping center: “It wasn't in the Louvre Museum, it was in the Carrousel du Louvre, which is a mall. (Less symbolic than what you're implying.)”
Wild also took issue with the idea that France “was on edge” and slammed Trump for using the attack to justify his executive order which denied US entry to people from seven majority-Muslim countries.
“France is not on edge again, at all,” she wrote. “I learnt about the attack 10 hours after it happened (even though it was in the media earlier), and I spent 1h30 in another mall in Paris at lunch today without any kind of military reinforcement (I mean, just the usual since Charlie Hebdo or nov 2015 attacks).
“Oh and by the way, the man is from Egypt, you know, the country you didn't ban from entering the US.”
The post evidently struck a chord with many as it has been shared more than 315,000 times since it was published on Friday, with numerous people adding their own thoughts.
Facebook user Sam Grey described it as a “Perfect reply from a French Resident.”
READ MORE: Machete-wielding man attacks security personnel at Louvre, terrorism suspected (PHOTOS)
“As usual, Trump gets it all wrong. Not only is his vocabulary limited, his reading comprehension sucks,” Suzette Sommer said on the social media website.
Another user, Tony Rush, said: “The U.S. President is a liar and an idiot. Literally, every...single...word that comes out of his mouth has to be fact-checked before an intelligent person can believe it. Read the post from Egle Wild just under this screenshot of Herr Trump’s tweet. Good lord.”
Sarah Ramirez quipped that, like one of his top advisers, Trump may have been talking about something else: “Maybe he was talking about bowling Green massacre?”
France has been in a state of emergency since 130 people were killed in terrorist attacks in Paris in November 2015. In December last year parliament voted to keep the special security powers in place until July.
