'Is it news? And what is the use of pulling this sort of glib micro-stunt?' 'The question about Trump and the Mussolini quote, then, is: what does it prove?' he intones. Things do not improve upon actually reading Robinson's scorching hot take. They are ridiculous people, made all the more so by how seriously they take themselves. Tacking a self-important 'not funny' headline on it just makes the whole thing more absurd. But the self-important puffery of fascists like Mussolini or an off-brand knock-off like Donald Trump has a dark humor to it.

Fascists did terrible things and killed millions of people. It's hard to look at the juxtaposition of that image and that headline and not laugh. The screenshot illustrates the self-refuting nature of this gambit. The shame-on-you-for-laughing hot take comes to us from Nathan Robinson at Current Affairs, with a headline that doesn't even try to hide the priggishness of his position. ' “It is better to live one day as a lion than 100 years as a sheep.” – #MakeAmericaGreatAgain'Īs soon as this happened, one thing became inevitable: That some fuddy-duddy out there would, upon sensing that people were enjoying themselves, rush forward to shame us all for taking even a moment of pleasure in this joke. ( The two men look scarily similar.) They kept up a steady stream of Mussolini quotes, tweeted at Trump, and eventually he bit. The prank was elegant, damn near perfect, in its simplicity: Ashley Feinberg and Adam Pash put together a Twitter account, using the fascist dictator's nickname Il Duce, and festooned it with blatantly fascist imagery, including a picture of Mussolini himself, with his hair photoshopped in to look like Trump's.

Over the weekend, Gawker successfully pranked Donald Trump by getting him to retweet a quote from Benito Mussolini.

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