Welcome to the Twitter jungle: Mnuchin feuds with Guns N’ Roses frontman
Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin waded into a bizarre Twitter dispute Wednesday with Axl Rose after the Cabinet official felt compelled to respond to an unprovoked online attack by the Guns N’ Roses frontman.
The unlikely social media feud, which unfolded against the backdrop of an ongoing pandemic and international economic crisis, began when the musician targeted the secretary in a tweet just before 6:30 p.m. EDT. “It’s official! Whatever anyone may have previously thought of Steve Mnuchin he’s officially an asshole,” Rose wrote.
Mnuchin fired back about an hour later, asking Rose, “What have you done for the country lately?” But the secretary’s message included a text emoji of the Liberian flag, which Mnuchin apparently mistook for the American flag. He later deleted that tweet and replaced it with an identical post swapping the national banner of the West African country with that of the United States.
Early Thursday morning, Rose offered a final retort mocking Mnuchin for his flag-related faux pas. “My bad I didn’t get we’re hoping 2 emulate Liberia’s economic model but on the real unlike this admin I’m not responsible for 70k+ deaths n’ unlike u I don’t hold a fed gov position of responsibility 2 the American people n’ go on TV tellin them 2 travel the US during a pandemic,” Rose tweeted, keeping with the signature punctuation preferences of his band.
Mnuchin, who has served as President Donald Trump’s Treasury chief since the outset of the administration, has emerged as perhaps the White House’s top negotiator on Capitol Hill amid the coronavirus outbreak — helping facilitate talks with leading Democratic lawmakers that produced a nearly $2 trillion emergency relief package in March and another roughly $500 billion aid measure last month.
Although his digital spat with Rose, an occasional activist, was wholly unexpected, Mnuchin did have a history of rubbing elbows with entertainment industry figures prior to foraying into the federal government. The former investment banker and Goldman Sachs alumnus had a successful career as a movie mogul, backing major films including 2016’s “Suicide Squad.”
Mncuhin and Rose’s exchange — which a Treasury Department spokesperson and the band’s management team did not immediately respond to a request for comment about — fortuitously came a day after the president visited a Honeywell factory in Phoenix manufacturing N95 face masks for health care workers. During that trip, Trump did not wear a mask, and Guns N' Roses’ 1991 cover of the song “Live and Let Die” blared inside the facility.