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Australian Journalist’s Trump Teardown Goes Viral Amid Interest in G-20


Tuesday July 11, 2017

President Donald Trump seated with President Enrique Peña Nieto of Mexico at the Group of 20 conference in Hamburg, Germany, on Friday. 

In an Australian news broadcast that seems to have resonated with Americans, a political journalist delivered a scathing evaluation of President Trump’s performance last week at the Group of 20 summit meeting in Hamburg, Germany.

The journalist, Chris Uhlmann, said in a segment originally broadcast on the program “Insiders,” that Mr. Trump was an “uneasy, lonely, awkward figure” at the meeting and that the president “has no desire and no capacity to lead the world.”

The video immediately took hold on social media, and by Sunday morning had been viewed more than a million times on Twitter and Facebook — further emphasizing how viral videos, once reserved for cute kitties and humorous mishaps, have become increasingly political, and that interest in these gatherings of world leaders is no longer just for policy wonks.

 

On the Facebook page for Occupy Democrats, a leftist advocacy group, the video has received nearly one million views.

Another viral moment from the gathering, this one a GIF, appears to show Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany, who hosted this year’s event, rolling her eyes at President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia. One tweet alone — accompanied by the words “Mansplaining, G20 style” — has about 82,000 retweets and 166,000 likes.

While Google data on this year’s G-20 conference is still being calculated, search interest in the United States appears to have surged compared with past years; interest in the G-20 had been weak since 2008.

And Mr. Trump spurred more interest in the conference as it approached, dominating the G-20 in Google queries in the run-up to the gathering.

As the event unfolded, Mr. Trump’s name continued to lead global searches in Google, even as queries for other world leaders rose and fell.

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In part, the uptick is quite likely because Americans are now exposed to foreign perspectives as social streams cross during global summits.

In the “Insiders” video, Mr. Uhlmann, the politics editor at the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, the country’s main public broadcaster, assessed Mr. Trump in bold and brash terms. His commentary would be out of line for American journalists, who are supposed to strive for objectivity and to keep opinions to the editorial pages.

“What did we learn?” Mr. Uhlmann asked about Mr. Trump’s stint at the conference. “We learned that Donald Trump has pressed fast forward on the decline of the United States as a global leader.”

In November, another harsh critique of Mr. Trump, also delivered via video, went viral. The Irish Labour senator Aodhan O’Riordain condemned the results of the United States election, calling the then president-elect a “fascist.” It has been viewed 3.3 million times on the senator’s Facebook page alone.

Domestic leaders like Representative Maxine Waters, Democrat of California, have gained traction by using pointed language toward Mr. Trump as well. She called him “a weak & impotent leader” in a July 6 tweet that was liked more than 54,000 times.

 

 





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