This image of Donald Trump feeding fish went viral – here’s what really happened
This is probably something Trump would label “fake news”.
A video of Donald Trump showing little restraint while feeding fish on his visit to Japan has proved controversial.
The US president and his Japanese host Shinzo Abe were filmed spooning food into a pond of koi carp fish outside of Akasaka Palace in Tokyo, when Trump seemingly decided he’d had enough.
Pictures of Trump upending the entire box of food directly into the pond below, with a laughing Rex Tillerson behind him, quickly went viral on social media – and people were quick to label it a massive faux-pas on the president’s part.
The incident was clearly very meme-worthy, and it didn’t take long before people starting adding their own captions to it.
People even suggested that Trump was putting the koi in danger.
But, while overfeeding can be a common problem for koi owners, all is not quite as it seems in the video.
The Japanese prime minister had actually dumped his box of food into the pond first.
Reports of the incident on various websites fail to mention that Abe went first, and as a result people have been criticising Trump’s actions.
The whole thing was actually pretty unremarkable, and clearly the pond which housed all the koi was large enough not to put the fish in danger.
Trump is just the latest world leader to visit Akasaka Palace, one of Japan’s two state guesthouses.
US president Gerald Ford was the first to stay in the renovated palace, in 1974, while Margaret Thatcher has also fed its fish. Princess Diana got a doll-making tutorial there and, most recently, Theresa May visited earlier this year.
