After delivering an address at the United Nations on Tuesday in which he threatened to “totally destroy” North Korea and inspired his own chief of staff to noticeably wince, Donald Trump finally got around to commenting on something that had apparently perturbed him for the previous couple of days: the 2017 Emmy Awards.
The Emmys made fun of Donald Trump. So he mocked the awards’ ratings on Twitter.
Two days after the ceremony, the president targeted the annual TV awards with his Twitter ire.
Alex Abad-Santos is a senior correspondent who explains what society obsesses over, from Marvel and movies to fitness and skin care. He came to Vox in 2014. Prior to that, he worked at The Atlantic.
Late Tuesday evening, the president tweeted an attack on the awards show’s ratings:
While it’s true that Sunday’s Emmys telecast was one of the lowest-rated in the history of the awards show, Trump’s “sadness” in response to that fact likely comes from a place of scorn rather than genuine concern.
This year’s ceremony was peppered with pointed jokes and attacks on the sitting president — jokes that began in host Stephen Colbert’s monologue with a dig at Trump’s preoccupation with never winning an Emmy for The Apprentice and continued with an outrage-inducing cameo from Trump’s former White House communications director Sean Spicer, several mentions of the president in acceptance speeches, and a 9 to 5 reunion that saw Jane Fonda, Lily Tomlin, and Dolly Parton take the stage and not-so-subtly imply that Trump is a lying bigot.
“Back in 1980, in that movie, we refused to be controlled by a sexist, egotistical, lying, hypocritical bigot,” Fonda said, setting up the joke. Tomlin then followed up Fonda’s quip with, “And in 2017, we still refuse to be controlled by a sexist, egotistical, lying, hypocritical bigot.”
It appears that the Emmys’ criticism of Trump has been sitting with the president since Monday morning, since his tweet references “last night” but was posted on Tuesday.
Trump has a well-documented obsession with TV ratings and has a long history of mocking those of any programming that insults him in some way. Sunday night’s Emmy Awards weren’t an exception.
