U.S. Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin Spars with Axl Rose on Twitter, Tweets the Wrong Country’s Flag
Folks, I know life is bizarre right now, but you can’t deny that these are also fascinating times in which we’re living. Like, after 9/11, I distinctly remember thinking, “Well, that’s my generation’s great collective trauma out of the way, it’s gonna be smooth sailing from here on out!” And then the country elected a reality show host to the highest office in the land, and I thought, “Woof! Well, it DEFINITELY cannot get any stranger than this!” But now there’s this whole pesky pandemic thing and we’re all walking around with masks and the whole world is shut down and it’s like, “Gosh, how kooky! This is gonna be one to tell the grandkids about! Surely, this is the weirdest thing that I will ever experience in my lifetime!!!”
Except then Axl Rose, lead singer for Guns N’ Roses, went and got into Twitter spat with Steve Mnuchin, the United States Secretary of the Treasury.
What happened is this: Rose, an outspoken critic of the Donald Trump administration and a vocal supporter of social distancing, sent out a tweet last night in which he called Mnuchin “an asshole.” This was, presumably, in response to Mnuchin’s refusal to adjust restrictions dictating how small businesses must use emergency government loans to stay afloat during the pandemic.
Rose didn’t tag Mnuchin in his tweet, so he probably thought that would be the end of. Heck, everyone who follows Rose on Twitter probably thought that would be the end of it. Also, that definitely should have been the end of it, because Rose is a rock star, and Mnuchin is, y’know, helping to run one of the most powerful governments in the modern world. Surely, responding to the guy who wrote “Welcome to the Jungle” is petty and beneath him, right?
That Mnuchin replied at all is odd, for all of the aforementioned reasons. Also, as this Twitter user noted:
And yet, that’s STILL not the most peculiar thing about the fact that Mnuchin responded! That honor goes to the fact that the flag in his tweet is not the American flag — it’s the Liberian flag.
Someone must have pointed this out to Mnuchin, because he then deleted his original tweet and sent a new one with the correct flag, thereby demonstrating how much he cared about trying to put Axl Rose in place, thereby making this entire incident even more ludicrous.
As of this writing, Rose hasn’t acknowledged Mnuchin’s reply. Which is probably for the best. I don’t know if my heart can take much more of this.
[via Metal Injection and Bring Back Glam!]
