On Monday night, President Donald Trump and first lady Melania Trump attended the 2020 College Football National Championship game between the LSU Tigers and Clemson Tigers.
The game, played at the Mercedes-Benz Superdome in New Orleans, featured LSU winning 42-25, capping off an undefeated season. But the real fireworks happened over on Twitter.
After journalist Timothy Burke (a former Daily Beast employee) posted a series of videos of actor Vince Vaughn chummily chatting with Trump and Melania in a skybox, accompanied by a cheeky caption, right-wing Twitter’s blue-checkmark brigade assembled, accusing lefty Twitter—with no evidence whatsoever—of being “triggered” by the episode.
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There was the Washington Examiner’s Siraj Hashmi, who, mimicking a liberal, cracked that “VINCE VAUGHN IS CANCELED.” This refrain was echoed by right-wing columnist Rita Panahi, far-right blogger/troll/serial plagiarist Benny Johnson, former NRA mouthpiece (and world’s foremost Neil Young hater) Dana Loesch, and those at Ben Shapiro’s right-wing rag The Daily Wire, who ran an article claiming “leftists” were “freaking out” over Vaughn’s back-and-forth with Trump and Melania, while only citing “numerous small left-wing accounts” that went uncited in the piece; rather, the piece chose to cite the tweets of a number of prominent right-wing talking heads imagining how the left would react to the news.
Vaughn, the 49-year-old star of Wedding Crashers and Swingers, is a staunch libertarian, having said he voted for Rand Paul in the 2016 election and supported Ron Paul before him. This is not a secret. In a controversial British GQ interview, he also spoke up for the rights of gun owners and advocated for arming schoolteachers to prevent mass shootings.
