U.S.—Trump recently shared a meme that showed him riding the “Hero Dog” into a space battle against several deadly threats from among the stars.
“AMERICAN HERO!” Trump tweeted when he posted the image, along with a winky face. The picture shows Trump fending off myriad threats, from Dune‘s gigantic sandworm and the Beast from beloved 1983 classic Krull to a Cylon Basestar and a Xenomorph.
Trump thought the image would be taken in a light-hearted manner, but he couldn’t have been more wrong.
A red light began blaring in the offices of The New York Times as soon as the image was posted. “Looks like we’ve got a live one, boys,” said one editor. “Err–I mean, non-gender-conforming persons. Let’s fact-check this puppy.” An army of fact-checkers then got to work, running the image through advanced fact-checking software. The Times recently had a huge supercomputer installed for this purpose, and they put it to work.
Sure enough, many of the pixels seemed not to line up quite right, plus fact-checkers discovered that several elements of the image were entirely fictional.
“The presence of a Cylon Basestar in the image casts doubt on its authenticity right away,” said Bart Tucker, head fact-checker at The Washington Post. “We were also able to trace the image of the sandworm to the cover of Avalon Hill’s 1979 board game Dune, so we can discredit that element of the space battle in any case.”
Further historical research suggested that nearly every element of the picture was fake, from TIE fighters and the Death Star to the looming Borg Cube.
“This president is trying to mislead the people with this meme,” said a CNN spokesperson. “We are only OK with politicians who mislead people with regards to the effects of their healthcare policies or their Native American heritage, not presidents who tell jokes and have fun.”