Trump's Toxic Twitter Tantrums
During the successful, high profile period of my career, when I worked for powerful organizations like The Onion, Pitchfork and Simon & Schuster I never imagined that twenty-three years into my career as a professional writer, I would make my living largely through self-publishing and blogging.
Yet The Big Whoop is an extraordinarily important component of my website, and consequently my career and a wonderfully cathartic outlet to work through my feelings about parenthood and popular culture and politics, particularly the unfortunate current inhabitant of the White House.
I do not follow Donald Trump on Twitter for the same reason I cannot watch him on television or listen to his voice: pretty much everything the man says and does makes me angry. Yet because I am a political blogger who writes regularly about Trump I end up looking at his Twitter feed an awful lot all the same.
Having to look regularly at Trump’s toxic Twitter tantrums is a necessary evil when you write about the president because his social media presence gives us such a thorough and horrifying window into his fractured psyche, incoherent rage and raging paranoia.
Sometimes I’ll be so disgusted by something Trump has tweeted that I call my wife over and say, “Look at what Trump just tweeted” and my wife understandably declines because she knows that nothing good can come from reading Trump’s tweets if you are not professionally obligated to do so.
You never learn anything new from Trump’s Twitter feed, either about the world or Trump himself. Instead, his Twitter feed just continually reaffirms what we already know.
Take, for example, the latest tweet being passed around on the internet by the Left as clearcut evidence of Trump’s unabashed evil and rapidly deteriorating psyche and by his fans as further proof that he’s a politically incorrect badass once again sticking it to the phonies and liars in the FAKE NEWS lamestream media:
““Concast” should open up a long overdue Florida Cold Case against Psycho Joe Scarborough. I know him and Crazy Mika well, used them beautifully in the last Election, dumped them nicely, and will state on the record that he is “nuts”. Besides, bad ratings! #OPENJOECOLDCASE"
We already know, of course, that Trump hates Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski with a ferocity and passion most would reserve for serial killers who murdered their entire family. Trump infamously tweeted of the couple, "I heard poorly rated @Morning_Joe speaks badly of me (don't watch anymore). Then how come low I.Q. Crazy Mika, along with Psycho Joe, came to Mar-a-Lago 3 nights in a row around New Year's Eve, and insisted on joining me. She was bleeding badly from a face-lift. I said no!”
Heck, we already know that Trump hates them so much for not supporting him after being in his social orbit that he feels entitled to lash out at them in the ugliest, most personal and childish manner possible, whether that means accusing a woman of aging badly, getting sub-par cosmetic surgery in a desperate attempt to hold onto her fading youth and desperately wanting to sit at the cool kid table at Mar-A-Lago with Trump when he doesn’t even like her that way or, in the case of Scarborough, (allegedly) murdering an intern he (allegedly) had an affair with and, in an even more disgraceful development, having bad ratings.
This tweet tells us nothing new about Trump. It only confirms that Trump feels strongly that everyone he doesn’t like or who has spoken out against him belongs in jail, whether for deleting emails, taking part in what he has repeatedly insisted is the greatest hoax in American politics (the impeachment) or, in the case of Scarborough, murdering an intern to cover up their scandalous affair.
This typically toxic tweet similarly confirms that when Trump really wants to hurt an opponent, which is roughly one hundred percent of the time, then the way to do so is by calling them crazy.
Over the course of 280 characters or under, Trump, arguably the most mentally ill president in American history, accuses the couple of being mentally ill no less than three times. First he dubs Scarborough “Crazy Joe”, then follows it up by deeming his wife “Crazy Mika”, then graciously volunteers to testify in court that Scarborough is “nuts”.
In Trump’s politically incorrect world, being mentally ill means that you are “bad” and “crazy” and belong in a prison or a mental hospital for the criminally insane. It’s not just pejorative: it’s the worst thing, which is deeply ironic given Trump’s mental state.
Outside Trump’s world, there is no shame in mental illness, no stigma. I myself have wrestled with Depression and Anxiety all my life. I like to think my own experiences have given me insight and empathy into the lives and struggles of other people who deal with these issues but Trump’s tweet indelibly conveys that in his mind at least, mental illness is a “politically correct” word for “crazy”, a pathetic, loathsome condition that afflicts ALL of his enemies, sometimes in the form of Trump Derangement Syndrome, but that, as a self-styled “very stable genius”, he most assuredly does not have.
Trump’s followers gush about his honesty and candor despite him being, objectively, a pathological liar seemingly incapable of telling the truth because of tweets like this. Trump has conditioned his followers to see politeness, decency and manners as noxious forms of willful deceit and frothing at the mouth expressions of blind hatred and uncontrollable rage as the epitome of truth, honesty and candor.
So while I am mortified by Trump’s loathsome rhetoric, his base undoubtedly eats it up, or happily dismisses it as crudely effective political theater designed own the libs and enrage his opponents. I, meanwhile, eagerly anticipate the day when I will no longer have to pay attention to Trump’s twitter feed and the man behind it, when I can ignore it the way I do every other Twitter account from racist, sexist, hate-poisoned fools with access to social media and nothing but ugliness in their souls and their feeds. I have used Trump beautifully for the purposes of this blog and my small business. Yet I cannot wait to dump him nicely the first chance I get.
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