Mars (of Which the Moon Is a Part)

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About

Mars (of Which the Moon Is a Part) refers to a series of reactions to a tweet by United States President Donald Trump who mistakenly tweeted that Earth's moon was part of Mars.

Origin

On June 7th, 2019, President Trump tweeted,^[1] "For all of the money we are spending, NASA should NOT be talking about going to the Moon – We did that 50 years ago. They should be focused on the much bigger things we are doing, including Mars (of which the Moon is a part), Defense and Science!" The post received more than 15,000 likes and 4,000 retweets in one hour (shown below).

Spread

While many were confused as to why the president was tweeting about this, Media Matters fellow Matt Gertz tweeted, "When Trump starts tweeting about a weird thing for no apparent reason…Left, Fox Business, 12:26 p.m.Neil Cavuto: NASA is 'refocusing on the moon, the next sort of quest, if you will, but didn't we do this moon thing quite a few decades ago?' Right, Trump, 1:38 p.m." He later wrote, "Actually, Trump's 'Mars (of which the Moon is a part)' line is probably referring to the NASA flack's point that going to the moon would help us get to Mars later on."^[2]^[3]

Following the post, many online mocked the president for mislabeling Earth's moon as part of Mars. Twitter^[4] user @matthewamiller tweeted, "So this week Trump continued his feud with a dead man, picked a new one with Bette Midler, attacked a royal family member, said Ireland should build a wall on its border with N. Ireland, that he didn't serve in Vietnam b/c it was far away, & the moon was part of Mars. Cool cool." Within 24 hours, the tweet received more than 2,900 likes and 1,000 retweets in (shown below, left).

Twitter user @gilbertjasono joked,^[5] "As JFK famously said, 'We choose to go to the Moon not because it is easy, but because it is Mars.'" The tweet received more than 2,400 likes and 600 retweets in 24 hours (shown below, center).

Twitter user @ditzkoff tweeted^[6] a photograph from the film Total Recall and the caption "get your ass to mars (of which the moon is a part)"