Trump’s live address from the Oval Office Tuesday was a bizarre and mostly unproductive waste of America’s collective evening, save for those gamblers who won big betting on how many lies Trump could tell in under ten minutes. But it looks like one local news editor in Seattle took it upon himself to liven up Trump’s low-energy performance—by morphing the hell out of the president’s face during the broadcast.
According to the Seattle Times, the doctored footage aired on Q13, Seattle’s local Fox affiliate, and featured a stretched and distorted Trump, his skin an even more brilliant hue of orange, periodically rolling an oversized tongue around his lips like a Jabba the Hutt cosplayer.
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Please, just watch:
It’s not clear when, exactly, the clip aired on Q13—it seems unlikely that the staffer was tweaking the footage live, so it probably aired during recaps after the fact—but one thing is abundantly clear: It is funny as all hell.
Unfortunately, the unnamed video editor’s bosses at Q13 weren’t exactly thrilled with the gag. In a statement issued Wednesday, Q13’s news director, Erica Hill, said that the goofy-ass clip “does not meet our editorial standards” and began looking into how the thing actually made it on the air. “We regret if it is seen as portraying the President in a negative light,” Hill said.
After a little sleuthing, Hill and her team tracked down the guy responsible for the prank and gave him the boot. “We’ve completed our investigation into this incident and determined that the actions were the result of an individual editor whose employment has been terminated,” she said in a statement to the Seattle Times on Thursday.
The identity of the video editor hasn’t been released, but hopefully, it won’t take long before he finds a job that will understand and appreciate his talents. In the meantime, thank you for your service, you rogue, mysterious prankster. You may have lost your job, but you have won our lifelong admiration—and, at the very least, brought a little light to this dark-ass chapter in our nation’s history.
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