The Petty, Misleading Photos We Need To Stop Sharing

The nonstop political shitblizzard of the past three years has turned even the most thought-we-were-hinged among us completely insane. But of all the ways the internet has gotten exponentially worse in every possible direction, one extremely stupid trend has really caught fire in the past year, even among seemingly reasonable people. It's finding DEEP, VIRAL MEANING in a single photo of a public figure's facial expression or body language.

For example, at Barbara Bush's funeral in April, a photo of Melania Trump cracking a smile while sitting next to Barack Obama went viral. This prompted not just the typical Trump insults, but also an array of extremely serious takes about what the photo MEANS.

Here's a tweet with 15,000+ retweets jokingly asking people not to share the pic with Trump because it's the "first time she's smiled in years." Another (10K likes) claims "Obama is a funny guy, but that's a woman craving distance from a monster being reminded what dignity looks like." And another asks "Have you ever, ever, EVER seen Melania smile like this, and look this relaxed, beside her own husband? Ever?"

Google "Melania smiling." It takes 0.01 seconds. Here's Melania smiling with Trump. Here's another one. But whatever, that's not that important.

Donald Trump sucks the maximum amount, and he should be made fun of at every possible opportunity. But these particular posts aren't just standard Trump twitter insults; they're Breitbart-esque grabs at virality that claim to be revealing some underlying fundamental truth. "Look at Melania's face ... only a woman impaled by the claws of Stockholm syndrome could exude such a mournful countenance. And her lone respite? Being near Obama once." Or ... she just kind of smiled for a second. As she's done a bunch of other times.

One of the most popular iterations of this phenomenon was a pic of Obama "staring down" Vladimir Putin at a G20 Summit. The pic went viral on Reddit a year ago with 26,000 upvotes, then again two months ago with the added caption "Remember when our President HAD BALLS?

YEAH! That's how a president is SUPPOSED to treat a scummy foreign leader. By GLARING DOWN at him. Trump doesn't have the BALLS to look vaguely mean at Putin for half a second. Of course, it again takes just a few keystrokes to find a dozen pics of Obama and Putin smiling together:

Also, what do we actually think Obama was doing there? He met with Putin and just SNEERED at him the whole time, because he's so anti-Putin? Is that what we want our world leaders to do? "This head of state I'm meeting with is one of the bad ones, so I better demonstrably frown at him for our entire conversation. He'll be so intimidated by my failure to display the basic skills of human interaction that he'll totally ease up on jailing journalists."

Finding deep meaning in minuscule body language goes beyond presidents we've already made up our minds about. If we're in the mood, we can turn any small gesture by a public figure into a symbolic banner for our everyday problems.
83,000 retweets! We literally don't even know what they were discussing there, but it was definitely an EPIC eye roll at Putin's MANSPLAINING, and not just a human making the lightest normal conversational facial gesture imaginable.

When Obama fist-bumps a White House maintenance worker, it's a wistful reminder of a time when our president had HUMAN DECENCY and RESPECT. When Trump shakes hands on the campaign trail or poses with coal miners, it's a shameless photo op. The latter's definitely true, but, c'mon, we really think Obama wasn't aware a camera was right there?

Then there's a whole UNIVERSE of Trump vs. Obama memes about how they relate to foreign leaders. Obama bowed to the Saudi King subserviently, but Trump DIDN'T:

TRUMP RULES!!! He's definitely not just a 70-year-old man who can barely move or even know what's happening around him at any time. He consciously chose NOT to bow as a display of American power.

But wait! Actually, Trump TOTALLY DID bow! Trump is a wrong foolish hypocrite, and so is Fox News for running this story!