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Since becoming president in January 2017, it's fair to say that Donald Trump has done a lot of embarrassing things but which one is the worst?
There are literally tons to choose from but thanks to a new study, researchers have managed to pinpoint the exact moment that Trump managed to embarrass Americans the most, and it's not the most obvious.
Cast your mind back to May 2017, when at a summit of NATO leaders in Brussels, Trump physically pushed the Montenegrin prime minister, Dusko Markovic, out of the way so he could be front and centre of a photo.
According to the study carried out by Frontiers in Communicationwhich looked at how often the word 'embarrassed' or 'embarrassing' was tweeted in relation to Trump between June 2015 and December 2017 and the aforementioned moment came out on top.
Here are a few examples of tweets containing those words from that fateful day.
The co-author of the study and assistant professor of advertising and public relations at Michigan State University told Insider:
When they're tweeting about embarrassment, they're tweeting about Trump and what he's doing.
If your leader is doing cringe-worthy actions, what we hypothesise is that that then induces this secondhand cringe-worthy, vicarious embarrassment in American citizens.
Other words such as 'disgust,''shame' and 'anger' had risen on Twitter since Trump became president, whilst the word 'happiness' was found to have a negative correlation with the president.
Besides the Markovic incident, other Trump moments that caused huge embarrassment for Twiter users included the following:
Not offering Angela Merkel a handshake when the German chancellor visited the White House.
Pledging to jail Hillary Clinton if he were elected.
Announcing that the US would be withdrawing from the Paris Agreement on climate change.
Trump's comments after the violence in Charlottesville in August 2017.
Previous studies have found that around 60 per cent of Americans are embarrassed by the president as he is supposed to represent what makes the US great.
The study adds:
President Trump is not just a US citizen like others who identify as American.
As an elected leader, he has an outstanding role for the common identity of US citizens: he is supposed to represent the US.
The deliberate trespassing of values and normative standards by Trump posts a specific threat for the social integrity of the represented.
HT Insider
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