Rules were meant to be broken.
Vice President Mike Pence was photographed blatantly ignoring a “do not touch” sign posted on space flight equipment during a visit to NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Florida, on Friday. The pictures, snapped by Reuters photographer Mike Brown, began making their rounds on the internet shortly after.
Twitter users joked about Pence’s disregard for the warning, while Redditors took it a step further. Some of the site’s users launched a Photoshop battle, manipulating the image as they saw fit.
The Veep later joined in himself, tweeting, “Sorry @NASA…@MarcoRubio dared me to do it!”
The Vice President was at Kennedy Space Center to speak on their workforce.
He wasn’t the only United States official going viral. On Thursday Donald Trump found himself the butt of his opposition’s jokes after he was apparently snubbed for a handshake by Agata Kornhauser-Duda, the first lady of Poland, while visiting Warsaw.
The moment was captured by nearby news cameras. Trump, 70, appeared stunned by the snub, smirking as Kornhauser-Duda spoke with his wife, Melania Trump.
After she and America’s First Lady wrapped up their conversation, Poland’s first lady returned for a quick handshake with Trump. Some cameras did not capture the moment, which gave way to online chatter about the snub.
Polish President Andrzej Duda addressed the issue on Twitter Thursday evening and it seems he took a page out of Trump’s playbook.
This is just one in a long string of handshake-related incidents the President has been at the center of since taking the oath of office in January.
During a visit to Israel Melania, 47, slapped Trump’s hand away as he tried to hold it on a tarmac. The following day she again refused an attempt by him to hold hands in Rome.
French President Emmanuel Macron found himself in the midst of a long, drawn out handshake with Trump during the NATO summit in Brussels. Macron later opened up to the Journal du Dimanche about his motivations during the uncomfortable moment.
“My handshake with him, it’s not innocent,” he said. “It’s not the alpha and the omega of politics, but a moment of truth.”
