President Trump's 2018 United Nations General Assembly Speech Reaction

Submission 16,928

Part of a series on Donald Trump. [View Related Entries]

About

President Trump's 2018 United Nations General Assembly Speech Reaction refers a series of jokes and memes regarding the laughter elicited by United States President Donald Trump during his speech before the United Nations. After proclaiming his administration's success, the audience presiding laughed at his comments to which the president responded, "didn't expect that reaction, but that's ok."

Origin

On September 25th, 2018, President Trump delivered a speech at the U.N. General Assembly (shown below).^[1] After claiming that he his administration has accomplished more than "almost any administration" in history, the crowd could be heard laughing. Upon hearing the laughter, he said, "Didn’t expect that reaction, but that’s okay."

Spread

Following the speech, people online began discussing and joking about the response. Senator Tim Kaine retweeted ^[2] an old Trump that read, "We need a President who isn't a laughing stock to the entire World. We need a truly great leader, a genius at strategy and winning. Respect!" Kaine added, "I agree." The tweet received more than 11,000 retweets and 63,000 likes in 24 hours (shown below, left).

Twitter user @DefenseBaron tweeted,^[3] "JUST IN: Trump opens UN speech saying, 'In less than two years, my administration has accomplished more than almost any administration in the history of our country' to which then entire UN general assembly LAUGHS OUT LOUD at the president of the United States." Within 24 hours, the tweet received more than 3,500 reweets and 11,900 likes (shown below, right).

The following day, people began using Trump's reaction to the laughter as the punchline in a image macro. On September 26th, Redditor ^[4] we-meme-in-a-society posted the image with the caption "When your low effort meme reaches the front page of r/all, 6 redditors give you gold and God himself is at your door waiting to shake your hand." The post received more than 7,000 points (97% upvoted) and 45 comments.

Numerous media outlets covered the speech and the reaction, including The Daily Dot, ^[5] BuzzFeed, ^[6] CBS,^[7] CNN^[8] and more.