The End of Trump’s Reign of Tweet Terror Is Near
The
president’s magic social media wand will soon be powerless.
By Kara Swisher
Ms.
Swisher is a contributing opinion writer.
- Nov. 17, 2020, 3:41 p.m. ET
It’s going to disappear. One day, like a
miracle, it will disappear.
Not Covid-19, despite some promising
news of late on vaccine development. I am talking about Donald Trump on
Twitter.
It was President Trump, of course, who
made that specious claim in February about
the pandemic, declaring it will go away — just like that. It was one of so many
lies he has told, culminating this week in a flurry of ALL-CAPS tweet lunacy
about the election results.
In a late-night frenzy on Sunday,
he typed, along with other lies, “I WON THE ELECTION.” It was quickly labeled
by Twitter — as have many of Mr. Trump’s digital expressions of late — as
inaccurate.
Watching Mr. Trump’s
Twitter odyssey has been disturbing and unsettling. But I am here to tell you
that the president’s tenure as troll in chief is at an ignominious end. Mr.
Trump’s magic social media wand will soon be powerless.
However loathsome it has been to some,
the president once had a genuine digital narrative. But he is badly misreading
the room by lapsing into indignant rage.
There are many people who would say I’m
wrong. They think that Mr. Trump’s reign of tweet terror will go on
indefinitely, assuming that he will be able to rouse his base with a tap of his
thumb for years to come.
It’s true that Mr. Trump has been
perhaps Twitter’s most adept user ever. He has a preternatural ability to
convey what he thinks without saying it directly through retweets of toxic
memes, cruel nicknames and big-mouthed compliments of himself and his
accomplishments.
For example, a classic Trump
dog-whistle tweet from September: “Biden REFUSED to use the term, LAW &
ORDER! There go the Suburbs.”
Most of his tweeting
has been horrid, some of it funny, and it was always, in its own malevolent
way, riveting.
But the mistake that Mr. Trump has
stumbled into lately — in full force this week — has been to be direct. Instead
of the obnoxious feints and ugly insinuations that have worked so well for him
on Twitter, driving his detractors nuts, he has been abandoning the implicit
for the explicit, thus making statements that are demonstrably untrue.
In the past, he could slip out of some
of his tweets by pretending he was joking. Less so, now. When he tweets lies
like “RIGGED ELECTION. WE WILL WIN!”, as he did on Sunday, they are verifiably
false.
He’s showing not only that the emperor
has no clothes, but that he looks pretty bad naked.
The added problem for him is that many
Twitter users, even some honest ones, are also labeled by Twitter with warning
lines like “This claim about election fraud is disputed” and “Official sources
called this election differently.”
For years, Mr. Trump has gotten a pass
on his skein of lies and petty aggressions — but now his tweets are labeled
over and over. Some consider the labels ineffectual, yet they are having a
cumulative effect, revealing that his spewing has been a big bunch of nonsense.
The question remains whether the effect
of labeling Mr. Trump’s tweets will filter down to his most vehement followers,
who lap up whatever he is peddling with gusto.
One clue to what is coming for Mr.
Trump is the sudden silence of QAnon. The landslide victory Mr. Trump had
promised did not materialize, and QAnon’s vaunted claim that the Deep State was
on the ropes now seems shaky.
“Q’s sudden
disappearance has been jarring for QAnon believers, who have come to depend on
the account’s posts, or ‘drops,’ for updates and reassurance,” wrote my Times
colleague Kevin Roose. And what’s worse for the Trump believers, all things
QAnon have been banned from Facebook, YouTube and Twitter.
Which is why it is not a stretch to
imagine Trump acolytes will get weary of the president’s antics when they are
no longer as much fun. And they will tire of them, too, because everyone
eventually tires of online acts. Mr. Trump resembles a hot app or viral video
or popular video game or cool start-up that can suddenly go ice-cold.
Do you remember Chatroulette?
HQ Trivia? Myspace? FarmVille? Fab? Grumpy Cat?
So, too, will Mr. Trump disappear. Like
those once-hot, then-not phenoms, he will continue to rage to an ever emptier
room until his rants meld into the louder noise. And then, a beastly new rough
voice, its hour come round at last,
will slouch toward Washington to be born.
This is our new political reality. And
it is scary that Mr. Trump has been trying to take democracy down with him as
he attempts to sell his latest scheme. But it is also clear that he is much
less able to weave a digital fantasy to ensnare his audience when the factual
world is intruding more strongly.
Put more simply, for
Mr. Trump, reality eventually bites and it bites hard.
