A campaign aide for Democratic presidential candidate Sen. Kamala Harris (D-Calif.) on Thursday replaced President Trump with the California lawmaker in a now-viral image of Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) standing at a table across from the president during a meeting at the White House.
Harris campaign national press secretary Ian Sams altered the image — taken Wednesday as top Democratic lawmakers met with Trump and other administration officials about Syria — to show Harris standing across from Pelosi.
He captioned it: “Time for an upgrade.”{mosads}
The move prompted confusion from social media users, some of whom questioned why Pelosi, a Democrat, would be standing up to Harris in the same way that she would Trump, while some scrutinized the image for being poorly edited, SFGate reports.
Others began making their own “time for an upgrade” memes.
Former Democratic presidential candidate and ex-Alaska Sen. Mike Gravel also weighed in, tweeting, “I can’t wait until Nancy Pelosi is berating my boss!”
Sams later deleted the tweet, telling SFGate that he was targeted by social media trolls.
“When I tried to make the point that we needed more than one strong woman leading a branch of government, rightwing trolls spammed my account,” he wrote in an email.
The altered image comes a day after Pelosi and Trump feuded. The speaker and other Democratic leaders said they left a White House meeting when Trump insulted Pelosi as a “third-rate politician” during a meeting aimed at discussing his controversial decision to withdraw U.S. troops from Syria.
After the meeting, the Democrats said Trump had a “meltdown,” prompting the president to post the photo that he alleged was evidence that it was, in fact, Pelosi who had a “meltdown” during their interaction.
Pelosi clapped back by making the image her Twitter cover photo, with lawmakers and social media users alike praising the photo of her confronting the president.