Donald Trump has been inaugurated as the 45th President Of The United States. That means he not only has control of the White House, but also the @POTUS Twitter handle, which now-former President Barack Obama used so effectively over the past eight years. And while the whole world waits with bated breath to see what kind of dumb shit Trump tweets from arguably the most powerful Twitter account in the world, his social media team is already fucking things up.
Adam Pash, the former editor-in-chief at Lifehacker, pointed out on Twitter that the new @POTUS header image, showing a sea of flag-waving fans, is not actually from Trump’s poorly populated inauguration today, but from Obama’s jam-packed inauguration in 2009. In other words, smooth move, Ex-Lax.
banner image on new @realDonaldTrump‘s @potus account shows highly attended inauguration… from 2009 https://t.co/mLUatJyIJF pic.twitter.com/zejh0qNjrN
— Adam Pash (@adampash) January 20, 2017
It’s since been changed to a close-up of a waving flag.
Pash’s tweet has, understandably, gone viral, with over 7,000 retweets since it was posted about an hour before this article was posted. Samantha Bee’s much smarter media team has responded to the @POTUS flub in kind, producing a banner it says more accurately represents the kind of draw Trump had today in D.C.
If it’s any consolation, when Obama had the @POTUS account, he had about 13.6 million followers. Trump’s @POTUS currently has about 3.6 million.
UPDATE: The @POTUS header is now a low-res photo of Trump looking out a window in what appears to be some room in the White House—or the Hermitage. Either or.
On the down side, the president now has about 5.3 million Twitter followers.
[Note: Lifehacker, like The A.V. Club, is owned by Univision Communications.]