This is another one in which the timeline and algorithm are uniformly serving up takes on this Trump post over and over.
The result is me looking at Twitter all morning long just refreshing and seeing how it develops. It’s awful, and I know it’s awful. My refresh is some attempt to make this progress into some sort of result that feels like “justice” or “ahhh finally we all believe that we all believe that this is bad!” but obviously that’s not coming.
So it feels like I’ve been chainsmoking. I feel the anxiety.
This both “of course he did this, this is just the next thing” and “I can’t believe he posted this”.
I genuinely don’t know what would have to happen for this whole 10+ year Trump-saga to have to end with any kind of dignity. Obviously, it will end one day. But I’m afraid we’ve crossed several thresholds wherein it ends and we no longer accept and share mutual moral and natural expressions of our humanity.
Ending it with dignity may even be the wrong framing. That may be wishful. Hoping that it ends without collapse may be the more realistic wish.
You finish reading the President of the United States cruelly saying “person doesn’t like me therefore bad things happen to them, what are ya gonna do? I told you so” and think, surely there’s recourse for me registering what should be obvious to everyone else: I disapprove; but there’s no way registry for dissatisfaction.
On drums the algorithm.
It seems like the only way you register your dissatisfaction is to join in the slop-troll wars.
Perhaps the Jack Posobiecs are just a few online people who have traded the dignity of having a soul for the Clicks, and that really something like “everyone” Offline is not okay with this kind of thing.
But, unfortunately I fear that Online is more important and influential in the discourse than Offline.
And when it comes time for everyone around Trump, who we can just aggregate as JD Vance, to do something that matters about all of this, I don’t have confidence they will rebuke him in any way.
Vance may be asked my some reporter about what he thinks about what Trump said about Rob Reiner and maybe he says something like, “Listen, I think the president is responding to the same kind of hate he’s gotten for defending the Average American and while I might not have said it like this, we’ve got to remember that the Radical Left has been talking like this for 10 years now. What do you expect The President to do?”
But that won’t mean anything unless he Tweets a simple rebuke of Trump.
And that won’t mean anything unless he plays some high-stakes D.C. Brutus character and hostile-takeovers the Republican party.
But that won’t happen.
We might just be in The Great Ravine. And the only way out is through years and years of this kind of loss of dignity and rejection of common morals.
We don’t yet seem to be in a land where writing this kind of post on the internet gets you put on the list, but we may just be on the margin of that. I hope not.