Post 2 in our series close-reading the Obama farewell speech has started ominously.
We put in the URL for the speech that we referenced in our first post—whitehouse.gov/farewell—into our usual search engine. The first time, we got a page with a photo of President Trump and VP Pence (which we didn’t think to get a screenshot of) giving a thumbs up and asking us to Make America Great Again.
We typed the URL into the field at the top of the page, and got a page with only this message:
We searched for it on the whitehouse.gov site and got this:
We tried the link from Google—same result.
We had thought maybe we should pause parsing Obama’s farewell to address the Trump inaugural address; now we’re not sure how to proceed. An attack so blatant on people searching for the Obama address, with the Trump/Pence screen that only comes up once, has shocked us for the moment. We won’t be silenced, so we’ll be back very quickly, but this deserves a stand-alone post.
Go try it yourselves. Then come back for our series.
The Historic Present 