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‘Nothing but respect for MY president’ meme is the most patriotic way to celebrate America

‘Nothing but respect for MY president’ meme is the most patriotic way to celebrate America

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#RaisedRight

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A few days ago, a Twitter user by the name Makenna posted a photo of herself cleaning President Donald Trump’s Hollywood Walk of Fame star, which had been defaced numerous times since the election (most notably with a swastika). “Nothing but respect for MY president,” she declared, adding the hashtag “#RaisedRight.”

Obviously her tweet went viral, and has since become a meme as a number of other Twitter users posted their own interpretations. Because while we may legally only have one president, what’s to stop us from having as many spiritual presidents as we can fathom?

First, there was some blowback for Makenna who only wanted to show her appreciation for Trump by physically scrubbing the graffiti off his Hollywood star. (To be fair, this has a reasonable chance of earning her an ambassadorship.) One Twitter user, @alexaagaarciaa, posed next to Trump’s star, which apparently has been re-defaced with anti-racism stickers, and sent her own message about our extremely unpopular president. She has since made her account private, but screenshots of her bird-flipping salute to Makenna (and Trump) have been making the rounds.

The lazier response was to retweet Makenna with some variation of “racist” or “idiot” added as a comment, which did nothing but further the retreat into our respective, polarized corners. But the more creative, admirable response was to find someone else’s Hollywood star, pretend to clean it up, and declare “nothing but respect for MY president.” This is American ingenuity at its finest: taking a blandly patriotic cultural product like Makenna’s tweet and flipping it on its head, revealing its inherent absurdity. Sure, Trump is president. But wouldn’t it be cooler if Meryl Streep was president? Or Charlie Sheen? Or Shrek?

Here are some of my favorites so far:

Even our friends in Russia got in on the fun.

On this Fourth of July, what better way to celebrate the birth of our nation than by going out and doing a little light housecleaning?

Update July 4th, 1:08PM ET: Our friends at web analytics firm Keyhole sent us these eye-popping statistics with regard to the meme. According to Keyhole, since @makenna_mg's post, #RaisedRight has ballooned to 71,000 tweets as of 12 pm ET today, but that’s nothing compared to the phrase that accompanied her tweet.

The phrase "nothing but respect for my president" has reached a staggering 406,000 tweets, Keyhole says. Seems like a lot of people are spending the holiday weekend retweeting memes rather than enjoying the weather.