Social media did not take kindly to U.S. Attorney General Jeff Sessions referring to the country’s 50th state of Hawaii as just “an island in the Pacific.”
Using the hashtag #IslandinthePacific, many on Twitter reminded Sessions that Hawaii is in fact part of the country, the birthplace of former President Barack Obama and home to Pearl Harbor.
Sessions told “The Mark Levin Show” earlier this week that he was “amazed that a judge sitting on an island in the Pacific can issue an order that stops the president of the United States from what appears to be clearly his statutory and Constitutional power.”
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Sessions was referring to Judge Derrick Watson, a federal district court judge in Honolulu, who struck down the second version of Trump’s immigration order banning immigrants from six majority-Muslim countries temporarily. He ruled the order discriminated against Muslims.
Hawaii was the first state to sue over Trump’s revised ban.
The now infamous phrase from Sessions has been mentioned more than 27,000 times online, according to Brandwatch, a social media monitoring company.
The Attorney General of Hawaii’s office tweeted an image of the act admitting Hawaii into the Union in 1959.
Senator Mazie Hirono chided Sessions for indulging in “dog whistle politics.”
Fellow Hawaiian Senator Brian Schatz also railed at Sessions’ jab.
A number of other Twitter users also made their voices heard:
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