
President Donald Trump was ridiculed Friday after commanding American companies to cut ties with China,
But the online mockery had just as much to do with how Trump phrased his un-enforceable demand — specifically, the president’s use of the word “hereby.”
Trump has previously deployed the rather archaic adverb to lend a sense of credence and a hint of gravitas to his pronouncements on social media, invoking the term at least five other times in tweets or retweets since assuming office in January 2017.
We hereby offer you a round-up of those episodes:
The message accompanied a POLITICO report on a file photo showing House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) at a 2010 group meeting that included Russian President Dmitriy Medvedev, as well as former Russian ambassador Sergey Kislyak.
Pelosi previously told POLITICO she had never met with Kislyak.The message came two days after The New York Times published a report stating that FBI agents in 2016 sent an informant to talk with Trump campaign foreign policy advisers Carter Page and George Papadopoulos — but only after the bureau received evidence of the aides’ contacts linked to Russia.
The message came two days after The Washington Post published a report revealing that administration officials sought to retaliate against Trump’s political rivals by releasing detained migrants in so-called sanctuary cities and Democratic strongholds including House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s congressional district in San Francisco.
The message followed a deal struck between Trump administration officials and representatives of Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador’s government. Trump backed off his threat to impose a 5 percent tariff on approximately $350 billion of Mexican imports and then raise the duty by 5 percentage points each month until it reached 25 percent on Oct. 1. In exchange, Mexico announced it would send 6,000 National Guard troops to the country’s southern border with Guatemala in an attempt to curb the flow of Central American migrants seeking to cross into the U.S.
Trump retweeted the message, which included a clip of a Rose Garden news conference at which he announced he would issue an executive order directing government agencies to obtain citizenship data. The move marked the end of the president’s protracted legal battle to tack a controversial citizenship question onto the 2020 census.
Article originally published on POLITICO Magazine