Eight days after April Fool’s day, The Boston Globe was still joking around. On Sunday, they published a fake front page from the future in the opinion section. This fictitious page details the type of conflict that Americans can expect from a Donald Trump presidency.
The page includes several fake articles, including headlines such as “Markets sink as Trade War Looms” and “Trump: Deporting Illegals ‘So Fast Your Head Will Spin’,” as well as several other alarming predictions. The Globe clearly isn’t too keen on the idea of a Trump presidency, as they accompanied this satirical front page post with a second opinion piece entitled “The GOP Must Stop Trump.”
NPR spoke with The Boston Globe’s deputy managing editor, Kathleen Kingsbury, to find out more about the buzzworthy stunt. Kingsbury explained that the Globe conducted thorough research through Trump’s Tweets, speeches, policy papers and many other reliable sources in order to accurately depict what his presidency would look like. Is anyone else terrified that what most people thought was a humorous joke was actually based on detailed research?
“His violent mix of intimidation, hostility to criticism and explicit scapegoating of minorities shows that there is a real political movement taking hold in America and that’s a movement that we find deeply disturbing, one that we felt we needed to comment on,” Kingsbury told NPR.
According to Yahoo! News, the Trump campaign responded Sunday afternoon. At a rally in Rochester, N.Y., Trump retaliated by saying “How about that stupid Boston Globe — it’s worthless.” He then continued by saying “They made up an entire front-page story — which is really no different than the whole paper.”
While Trump may have tried his best to throw shade at the Globe, I guess he didn’t realize that every headline was based on promises that he has already made to the American public.
The satirical page sure did provide a good laugh—but let’s hope a year from now it will still be just a funny joke, rather than breaking news.