Donald Trump's 2020 Axios on HBO Interview

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Overview

Donald Trump's 2020 Axios on HBO Interview occurred on July 28th, 2020, and Axios released the video interview on August 3rd, 2020. The interview between United States President Donald Trump and Axios journalist Jonathan Swan touched on such topics as the coronavirus, the 2020 U.S. Presidential Election, the Black Lives matter movement and more. The interview inspired a number of memes based on Swan's confused and frustrated responses to Trump's answers.

Background

On July 28th, 2020, Axios held an interview at the White House between President Trump and reporter Jonathan Swan, an Axios journalist. Days later, on August 3rd, HBO released the full interview on YouTube, where it received more than 695,000 views, reaching #8 on YouTube's trending charts, in less than 24 hours (shown below).

Developments

Online Reaction

On August 3rd, 2020, Axios published a clip from the interview on their verified Twitter account. Within 24 hours, the tweet received more than 22 million views, 200,000 likes, 130,000 retweets and 18,000 comments (shown below).

.jonathanvswan</a>: “Oh, you’re doing death as a proportion of cases. I’m talking about death as a proportion of population. That’s where the U.S. is really bad. Much worse than South Korea, Germany, etc.”<a href="https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">realdonaldtrump: “You can’t do that.”Swan: “Why can’t I do that?” pic.twitter.com/MStySfkV39

— Axios (@axios) August 4, 2020

Following the release of the video, people began posting memes about the interview. For example, on August 4th, Twitter^[1] user @jbillinson tweeted two images of Swan looking confused with the caption, "strong new meme template." The tweet received more than 14,000 likes and 2,700 retweets in less than 24 hours (shown below, left). Twitter^[2] user @erinscafe tweeted a two-panel tweet featuring Trump's quote "We have a new phenomenon, it's called mail-in voting." The following pane shares Swan's response, "It's been here since the Civil War." The tweet received more than 580 likes and 200 retweets in less than 24 hours (shown below, center).

Many Twitter users began sharing a four-panel format that features Swan reacting to a document handed to him by Trump. Memers add a panel that shows the absurd content of the document (shown below, right).

The interview also inspired conversation on Reddit, where topics in the /r/politics^[3] subreddit received more than 34,000 points (90% upvoted) and 3,800 comment in less than 24 hours.

Media Coverage

Several media outlets covered the highlights from the interview, including The Washington Post,^[4] CNN,^[5] USA Today,^[6] Mashable, ^[7] The Guardian,^[8] Slate^[9] and more. MSNBC anchor Chris Hayes commented on Twitter,^[10] "Many astounding things about this clip, but really striking that the President’s brain is too mushy to even remember 'We have a lower case fatality rate than other countries.' He just remembered there was a graph with different lines that we were doing well on." The tweet received more than 12,000 likes and 2,800 retweets in less than 24 hours (shown below).

Confused Reporter Jonathan Swan

Confused Reporter Jonathan Swan, also known as Reporter Reading Paper From Trump, is an exploitable image macro series depicting Axios journalist Jonathan Swan taking a piece of paper from Donald Trump with a confused expression during the 2020 Axios interview on HBO. The format is typically used by adding a perplexing question or absurd artwork to the paper the reporter reads, to which he then responds with a puzzled look. The meme was popularized on a number of social media platforms and sites in early August 2020.