White House Newsletter Accidentally Cites Satirical Article About Trump Budget, Becomes Parody Itself

It’s Friday, so it’s clearly time for a bit of absurdism at the end of a long week. Thankfully, the Trump White House has delivered, with their official newsletter accidentally (though we doubt the paranoia patrol will settle for that explanation) linking to a satirical article about Trump’s terrible budget, by Alexandra Petri on the Washington Post, in a “news reports” section usually featuring generally positive articles from the likes of Breitbart and Fox News. Yes, in real life.

As of this writing, the link is still there, but we’ve screencapped for posterity/to giggle at. [UPDATE:] It’s down now, so here you go:

I’d also note that the Washington Post’s articles sit behind a paywall, but I can’t imagine the average Trump newsletter reader has ever read a WaPo article, so they were probably all well within their allotment of free preview articles. That would’ve allowed them to see this, in the article titled, “Trump’s budget makes perfect sense and will fix America, and I will tell you why”:

“Office of Management and Budget Director Mick Mulvaney has called it a “hard power budget” which is, I think, the name of an exercise program where you eat only what you can catch, pump up your guns and then punch the impoverished in the face. This, conveniently, is also what the budget does.”

And this:

“Labor Department: There will be no LABOR in the future. Labor is what women do, I think. All fetuses will burst out of wombs brandishing an Uzi on each arm. (Also, we will cut the funding to the people who would have explained that this is not how birth or labor works.)

We are decreasing funding to the National Institutes of Health because in the future we will cure disease by punching it, or, if that fails, sending drones after it. Also, we will buy more planes and guns to shoot airborne viruses out of the sky.”

And a much more from a whole, entire, not-subtle-in-any-way takedown of Trump’s budget proposal, which congress will hopefully save us from [insert pause for laughter].

To be fair, I’m also pretty sure that the average Trump newsletter reader never reads past a headline anyway—obviously whoever handled today’s edition didn’t—so they were probably very happy with the inclusion of such a glowing review. Petri seems pretty excited about it, too, since there really is no better possible end result for such a piece of satire:

I’m sure that, if confronted with this, Trump’s staff would just claim it was a joke or say it was to show how unfair the media is to them.

That darn fake news strikes again. Reading is just so hard!

(via The Slot, image via Evan El-Amin / Shutterstock.com)

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Dan Van Winkle

Dan Van Winkle (he) is an editor and manager who has been working in digital media since 2013, first at now-defunct Geekosystem (RIP), and then at The Mary Sue starting in 2014, specializing in gaming, science, and technology. Outside of his professional experience, he has been active in video game modding and development as a hobby for many years. He lives in North Carolina with Lisa Brown (his wife) and Liz Lemon (their dog), both of whom are the best, and you will regret challenging him at Smash Bros.

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