The White House Just Praised This Ridiculous Headline Without Realizing It Was Over-The-Top Sarcasm

Have you noticed how great America is again? We’ll forgive you if you weren’t taking detailed notes. After all, we were warned we were going to be doing so much winning in 2017 that we’d get tired of winning.

Thankfully, the White House is on the case. In their daily email briefing, they made sure to let folks know about the absolutely powerful, totally not fake news coming from The Washington Post today, which said of President Trump’s proposed budget:

“Trump’s budget makes perfect sense and will fix America, and I will tell you why.”

Pretty great, right?

As Politico notes, along with publishing President Trump’s daily schedule, the 1600 Daily email includes “highlights from the president, first lady, vice president, and second lady. It also features news reports generally favorable to the administration.”

So, it makes sense they’d want to make sure everyone saw the big turnaround happening at (the previously failing) The Washington Post.

The only problem was that was an op-ed piece written by Alexandra Petri, a humorist and opinion writer. The Post was using the headline as a painfully obvious bit of sarcasm. Honestly, if we had any complaint about that headline, it would be how it leans on the trope of Trump overstating his prowess in all things.

And in case the White House didn’t quite catch that bit of artful humor, you’d really hope they would have picked up on it in the opening paragraphs of the piece:

This budget will make America a lean, mean fighting machine with bulging, rippling muscles and not an ounce of fat. America has been weak and soft for too long. BUT HOW WILL I SURVIVE ON THIS BUDGET? you may be wondering. I AM A HUMAN CHILD, NOT A COSTLY FIGHTER JET. You may not survive, but that is because you are SOFT and WEAK, something this budget is designed to eliminate.

Chances are, like so many internet trolls, the White House employee who put this email together never bothered to click on the actual article headline and instead just made broad assumptions based on the headline. But how great would it be if they read that paragraph and really thought it was real?