A guide to Understanding Trump’s Tweets for the Media and the #Resistance

This morning, America woke up to Donald Trump, our president, having tweeted a short video pulled from the r/the_donald by a user named “HanAssholeSolo” of Trump in a WWE match with the CNN logo superimposed over his opponent, WWE owner Vince McMahon’s, face. I would say that this is the dumbest sentence in political history and that nothing will ever top it, but by the end of the month, something even more insane will have happened and we’ll have forgotten all about this. It’s known online as Christman’s Law. People saw this tweet and promptly lost their minds. I’m here to tell you not to do that, and to provide you with a framework for understanding and engaging with the Trump’s postings.

The major mistake that people are making is that they’re engaging with these as though they are inherently presidential, and they’re looking at them from that lens. If you see this as a official dispatch form the commander and chief, it’s very easy to see this as part of a grand scheme of media suppression, and that this is part of Trump’s authoritarian tendencies and NOT NORMAL. This leads to a lot of unneeded handwringing and angst about the future of our democracy, and is the wrong way to look at this.

The proper way to engage with Trump’s tweets is to see them for what they actually are. Not a release from the President of the United States, but the online rantings of a 71 year old man who gets all of his information about the world from Fox News. All of his talk about the media is completely indistinguishable from the tweets of a #TCOT guy with a name like @PatriotSteven1776, and when Trump tweets we need to remember that. It’s not an existential threat to our democracy, it’s just the guy who rants in the comments of a local newspaper with an outsized platform for it. Instead of panicking, laugh at it because it is completely absurd.