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In December 2020, readers asked Snopes to check the authenticity and accuracy of a diatribe against outgoing U.S. President Donald Trump, widely attributed to actor and director George Clooney. The speech has been shared many thousands of times over the past three years, in social media posts, and in the form of memes. For unknown reasons, it enjoyed something of a resurgence in October and December 2020. A typical post read: Some of those posts and memes contained a small number of very minor tweaks in wording, but overall, they accurately and fairly attributed the diatribe to Clooney, who did indeed hammer Trump as a guy who takes a shit in a gold toilet and lives in a gold tower, and did indeed finish his speech by telling Trump Fuck you! Clooney's remarks came in the context of an interview with the Daily Beast, published on Sept. 22, 2017. Many of the viral social media posts claimed Clooney was speaking in response to Trump's accusation that Clooney was part of a Hollywood elite. But that's not quite right. The question (or prompt) to which Clooney was responding was, Trump has been stoking this culture war between coastal elites and Middle America — the irony of course being that Trump himself is a coastal elite. Below is the exchange as it appeared in its original context:
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