Deadspin had a terse reply for Donald Trump on Thursday after he tweeted his congratulations to the site for breaking the story that the girlfriend of Notre Dame linebacker Manti Te'o never existed.
"Congratulations to Tom Scocca and Timothy Burke of @Deadspin for exposing the Manti Te'o fiasco," Trump tweeted on Thursday morning.
Deadspin's reply came less than fifteen minutes later.
"Go f**k yourself," it said simply. Then, a few hours later, Deadspin posted about Trump's tweet on its website.
The post, titled "A Very Important Message From Donald Trump," contained just one sentence in the body of the article: "You forgot Jack Dickey, you dolt."
Jack Dickey was the other Deadspin writer who, along with Tim Burke, broke the bombshell story on Wednesday.
For some reason, Trump only congratulated one of the writers of the report. He also chose to congratulate Deadspin's former managing editor, Tom Scocca, even though Scocca no longer works for Deadspin and seems to have had a relatively minor role in the Te'o story, the Poynter Institute notes.
Here's how the dialogue played out on Twitter:
On Wednesday Deadspin broke the story that Te'o's girlfriend, Lennay Kekua, not only didn't die tragically of luekemia, as had been widely reported, but never existed at all.
The story of the linebacker's emotional relationship with Kekua as she battled cancer, as well as his perseverance after her death, had earned Te'o vast amounts of positive publicity throughout the past few months as he led Notre Dame to an undefeated regular season.
Notre Dame held a press conference on Wednesday night to say that Te'o was the victim of a hoax rather than a participant.