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Donald Trump's mocking tweets about Charlie Hebdo resurface after President criticises terrorism coverage

A succession of posts criticised the magazine's financial position and its lack of success, days after members of its staff were shot and killed

Andrew Griffin
Wednesday 08 February 2017 16:16 GMT
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Picture: (Andrew Harrer / Pool / Getty Images)

Donald Trump's tweets about the attack on Charlie Hebdo have resurfaced after the President criticised coverage of terrorism.

The President mocked the magazine for its lack of success and bad finances, just days after attackers broke into its offices and killed 12 people.

The White House has claimed that the media is either refusing to cover or minimising its coverage of a range of terrorist attacks allegedly perpetrated by Isis. Officials claimed that the group is perpetrating a "genocide" in the US and pointed to a list of 78 attacks that weren't covered enough.

The list doesn't include the shootings at Charlie Hebdo in January 2015. But it does reference the killings by Amedy Coulibaly, who shot one police officer and four hostages in a kosher supermarket in an attack that occurred at the same time and was linked to the attack on the French satirical magazine.

In the wake of that criticism – which media organisations have pointed out is untrue and ignores the vast coverage given to the terror attacks – fresh scrutiny has been applied to Mr Trump's own tweets.

Just a week after the attacks on Charlie Hebdo, he posted a series of messages that mocked the magazine and the staff who worked at it. The magazine was having "no success", he wrote just days after 12 people were shot at its offices, and he mockingly wrote that the two gunmen should have just waited for it to fold.

Spy magazine was a satirical monthly magazine based in New York that ran between 1986 and 1998. It is in large part remembered for mocking and exposing Donald Trump among other celebrities, and christened him with the "short-fingered vulgarian" reference that still follows the President around.

Last year, the Spy magazine founders re-united to discuss that same mockery of Mr Trump, and suggested that it continues to torment the then-Presidential candidate. “I think he’s made pretty clear that he has wonderful, powerful, beautiful hands," an aide to Mr Trump said in response to the story.

Mr Trump has posted a range of other tweets in response to terror attacks, including blaming the Paris shootings on the fact that people didn't have guns to shoot back at their attackers with.

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