Towards the end of the final presidential debate, the candidates were asked questions about foreign policy. Specifically, the moderator Chris Wallace asked Donald Trump to clarify a few statements he had made about the siege of Aleppo, in Syria, during the second presidential debate. Wallace asked Trump:
In the last debate, you were both asked about the situation in the Syrian city of Aleppo, and I want to come back to that because you said several things in that debate that were not true. You said Aleppo had basically fallen; in fact there are a quarter of a million people there being slaughtered. And you also said that Syria and Russia are busy fighting ISIS; in fact they have been the ones who have been bombing and shelling eastern Aleppo, and they just announced a humanitarian pause, in effect admitting that they had been bombing and shelling Aleppo. Would you like to clear that up?
As any student caught unprepared, Donald Trump wasn’t really able to deliver a coherent answer. Antonio French, a city alderman in St. Louis, Missouri, summarized it effectively on Twitter:
This prompted other users to bring back a hashtag that had been launched in July but hadn’t gained much momentum: #TrumpBookReport. This time, it took off, and here are some of the best tweets that were shared.