commander-in-tweets
Trump chose a very unfortunate phrase to celebrate progress with China
Near the start of a five-post thread on his Saturday trade talks with Chinese President Xi Jinping, President Trump made an unfortunate phrasing decision on Twitter Monday morning:
The phrase in question is "BIG leap forward," which observers quickly noted sounds an awful lot like the "Great Leap Forward," a 1958 to 1962 campaign by Chairman Mao Zedong to industrialize communist China which left between 20 and 55 million people dead.
The Great Leap Forward has been called the worst man-made disaster in world history. It led to mass-scale famine in China, starving tens of millions while millions more were executed or tortured to death by the state.
Trump's tweet does not indicate whether he realized the allusion he was making. But Factba.se — which offers a searchable database of all Trump's public comments as president — does not turn up any other instances in which he has used the phrase "leap forward."