Twitter’s Most Popular Tweet This Week: Hillary Trolls Trump’s Coronavirus Response

Topline: Hillary Clinton advised followers not to take medical advice from President Trump as the number of coronavirus cases skyrocketed across the country, in a tweet that received the most likes on Twitter this week, according to data compiled by the social media tracking firm NewsWhip.

• “Please do not take medical advice from a man who looked directly at a solar eclipse,” Clinton wrote on March 24, one day after reports surfaced that Trump wanted to end social distancing in order to restart the economy.
• By Sunday afternoon, Clinton’s tweet had racked up over 1.8 million likes, and received the most interactions on Twitter since the previous Sunday, March 22, 2020.
• Clinton was referencing the August 2017 total solar eclipse, which was the first time the United States had been within the path of one since 1918; it was also a major media event and widely covered across the world.
• Eclipse viewers were instructed to wear eye protection, because staring directly at an eclipse can damage retinas permanently. 
• Trump, however, was photographed without eye protection, staring directly at the eclipse, while wife and first lady Melania Trump wore an oversized pair of sunglasses; at the time, the images and video went viral.
• NewsWhip’s Twitter engagement data comes from its database of influential users, which tracks around 350,000 accounts. 

News peg: Trump, along with his administration, has been roundly criticized for his response to the coronavirus pandemic. The president has been accused of first downplaying the virus threat, then for not using his executive authority to provide much-needed ventilators and medical equipment to states besieged with cases, along with what Clinton may have been criticizing: reopening the country before medical experts said it would be safe to do so. Trump also touted anti-malaria drug chloroquine, along with lupus and arthritis drug hydroxychloroquine, in a press conference after the Food and Drug Administration approved the drugs for clinical testing. An Arizona man died three days after that press conference by ingesting chloroquine phosphate, which is used to treat parasites in fish. Trump rated his administration’s response as a 10 on March 16, and also said his January 31 decision to restrict travel from China has saved “thousands and thousands” of lives.   

Key background: Clinton, a former Secretary of State, U.S. Senator and first lady who lost the 2016 presidential election to Trump in a defeat that stunned the world, has previously used her Twitter account to criticize the president. She’s trolled Trump on the number of his former associates who were indicted by Robert Mueller and for tweeting out the meaningless word “covfefe” to his 30 million-plus followers, along with offering to send him a copy of her children’s book after he attacked her election memoir, What Happened. After clapping back at Trump over the solar eclipse, Clinton again criticized his coronavirus response. “He did promise ‘America First,” she tweeted on March 27, once the U.S. became the country with the highest number of coronavirus cases.