By Christie D’Zurilla / Los Angeles Times
Imagine being the president of the United States and spending your time tweeting about a TV show you watched. Now imagine being a celebrity couple and spending your time tweeting about that president watching that TV show.
Chrissy Teigen, John Legend and President Donald Trump were yelling at one another Sunday on Twitter over MSNBC’s coverage of criminal justice reform, which led to a profane hashtag (that we can’t mention here) referring to Trump.
By Monday, that hashtag had spawned — with no help from the three parties involved — a less profane one referring to Teigen: #filthymouthedwife.
“When all of the people pushing so hard for Criminal Justice Reform were unable to come even close to getting it done, they came to me as a group and asked for my help,” Trump tweeted, promoting his support for a bipartisan 2018 legislative effort pushed by adviser Jared Kushner. “I got it done with a group of Senators & others who would never have gone for it. Obama couldn’t come close … .”
POTUS noted that when he signed the bipartisan bill many people were “profusely grateful.” Republicans, he said, deserved praise. Then his series of tweets launched in on Legend and Teigen.
“Guys like boring musician johnlegend, and his filthy mouthed wife, are talking now about how great (criminal justice reform) is — but I didn’t see them around when we needed help getting it passed,” Trump wrote.
Legend, of course, replied.
“Imagine being president of a whole country and spending your Sunday night hate-watching MSNBC hoping somebody — ANYBODY — will praise you. Melania, please praise this man. He needs you,” Legend wrote.
Trump apparently couldn’t or didn’t want to mention Teigen by name, which she noticed.
“(T)agged everyone but me. an honor, mister president,” she wrote. In his tweets, Trump had tagged not only Legend but also CNN host Van Jones, who works with the Reform Alliance, and “NBC Nightly News” host Lester Holt, who hosted “Life Inside,” the MSNBC special that the president appeared to be reacting to.
“(T)he absolute best part of his tweet is I literally didn’t speak in the special, nor was I mentioned. I’m cackling at the pointless addition of me,” Teigen tweeted. She then leveraged her 11.5 million followers and Legend used his 12.9 million to get the profane hashtag trending.
The hashtag #filthymouthedwife appears to have come later, as people seized on the phrase much like they’d pounced on Trump labeling Hillary Clinton a “nasty woman” during the 2016 campaign.
