It’s a truth universally acknowledged that your bad old tweets can and will come back to haunt you.
This is true for everybody, but it’s especially pertinent if you’re a world leader who tweets constantly, and has no issue publicly berating a child.
On Thursday, as pollsters in Nevada, Pennsylvania and a few other swing states scrambled to count all of the ballots and finally call the American election, President Donald Trump tweeted an all-caps plea to stop the democratic process from taking place.
Many Twitter users joked that he might as well be talking about Count von Count from Sesame Street.
But climate activist Greta Thunberg took a different approach, drawing on an insult Trump had previously used about her.
“So ridiculous,” she wrote. “Donald must work on his Anger Management problem, then go to a good old fashioned movie with a friend! Chill Donald, Chill!”
The message, of course, was a word-for-word, random-capitalisation-for-random-capitalisation take on Trump’s response when Thunberg was named Time’s Person of the Year in December.
At the time, Thunberg had another smart Twitter comeback: she changed her bio to include his taunts.
Somehow, that wasn’t the American president’s first Twitter attack on the youth environmental activist. After she gave her famous “How dare you” speech to the UN last September, Trump sarcastically wrote that “she seems like a very happy young girl looking forward to a bright and wonderful future.”
That one, too, made it into her Twitter bio.
Trump hasn’t yet chimed in on Thunberg’s response. Perhaps this week, he actually does have more important things to do than start a feud with a kid who’s trying to make the world a better a place.