Early Friday morning, after news broke that President Donald Trump tested positive for the coronavirus, the Washington Post deleted a tweet inviting readers to “imagine what it will be like never to think about Trump again.”
The opinion piece it linked to was written and posted before the news broke.
“The Post has removed a tweet pictured below, which was written Thursday and released through an automated program, because the subsequent news of President Trump’s infection rendered it tasteless,” said the official Twitter account for the newspaper, which posted a screenshot for transparency.
The article itself, by Eugene Robinson, is actually an appeal for Americans to vote for Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden to “remove this awful man from our collective headspace.”
“If you are like me and you watched Tuesday’s debate with a voice in your head screaming make it stop, take heart: We have the power to do just that. We can evict President Trump from the territory he has forcibly seized in our minds. We can — we must — vote him out of our thoughts,” Robinson wrote.
About 208,000 Americans have died from the coronavirus. There have been over 7 million confirmed domestic cases, two of which now include Trump and First Lady Melania Trump.