Nordic PM’s Troll Trump’s “Orb” Photo Or Something

Yeah, this happened

(Reuters) World leaders don’t generally troll each other, but the prime ministers of the five Nordic countries are giving it a shot.

They just posted a photograph of themselves clasping a soccer ball — a droll take on a photo of President Trump, Saudi King Salman and Egyptian President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi holding a glowing orb that went viral last week.

That orb was an illuminated globe at the Global Centre for Combating Extremist Ideology in Riyadh, the opening of which the three leaders were attending on May 21. Eerie lighting gave the photo an aura of comic-book villains plotting world domination, an image that proved irresistible to the Twitterati.

And, apparently, it was just as irresistible to Lars Lokke Rasmussen, Juha Sipila, Bjarni Benediktsson, Erna Solberg and Stefan Lofven, the prime ministers of Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway and Sweden respectively.

Here’s the photo

One has to wonder at the motivations. Good natured or snotty?

“Who rules the world? Riyadh vs Bergen,” Solberg wrote under the Trump photo and the photo of her and her fellow Nordic leaders.

“Don’t know what those in the upper photo were thinking,” she wrote. “In the lower one are the five Nordic prime ministers, holding a ball with the sustainability goals. We’re hoping they’ll be a roadmap for the future.”

Kinda hard to have “sustainability goals”, which are about ‘climate change’, when your nations are being overrun with Islamic refugees bringing their cultures of rape and such. This especially should ring true for Sweden’s PM Stefan Lofven. As for Ms. Solberg, if your country has to give classes to refugees explaining that rape is bad, you’re letting the wrong ones in.

Interestingly, they’re trying to walk the trolling back

Norwegian government official Sigbjoern Aanes says the photo taken Monday at a meeting of regional government heads in Norway was meant as “a funny stunt” to promote U.N. environmental sustainability goals, which were written on the soccer ball.

He told The Associated Press that Norwegian Prime Minister Erna Solberg only later realized that the photo was reminiscent of the one of Trump at the opening of a counterterrorism center in Saudi Arabia earlier this month. Trump, the Saudi king and the president of Egypt gathered around a lighted orb.

Uh huh.