RIP Donald Trump's Twitter Account

When I saw that even Chris Christie, a longtime friend and supporter of Donald Trump, now thought that our lame duck president should be impeached, my brain reflexively went to a place it has gone hundreds, if not thousands, of times over the past four or five years. 

I wondered what Trump would tweet about what he would undoubtedly see as the former New Jersey governor’s unforgivable betrayal. Then I had to catch myself: Trump would not be tweeting anything because he was banned from Twitter for life. 

Even without Trump tweets I knew damn well how Trump felt about Christie’s words. They undoubtedly filled him with the white-hot boiling rage that has long been his default emotional state. 

If he were still on Twitter, Trump would have lashed out petulantly at Christie in deeply ugly, deeply personal ways. He would attack Christie’s loyalty, his intelligence and his competence, as a lawyer and politician and in every other way. He might make jokes about Christie’s weight and appearance, as he did even when Christie was one of his staunchest supporters and allies. 

Trump would accuse Christie of being a RINO in bed with the radical, extremist left, and a secret Obama/Clinton super-fan angling for a job on CNN or MSNBC. He’d also attempt to minimize the pretty central role Christie has played in his political career while somehow simultaneously taking credit for all of Christie’s successes. 

I knew exactly how Trump would have responded. He’s hopelessly predictable that way. But I would search “Realdonaldtrump” on Twitter all the same to see just how ugly, nasty and childish his response would be. 

In that respect, Trump never disappointed. He always managed to shimmy under even the lowest expectations. For four endless, nightmarish years checking to see what horrible thing Trump would tweet has been a weird ritual at once masochistic and Schadenfreude-rich. It was masochistic because it meant willingly exposing myself to Trump and his endless toxicity. Yet it was also schadenfreudetastic because I took great pleasure in Trump being very publicly unhappy all the time. 

Trump used Twitter as a rage-dissemination machine, as a way of providing real-time updates as to who he was hating at any given moment and why. On Twitter, and in real life, Trump only seems capable of two intense, rigid, conflicting emotions: anger and pride. 

There were other elements to this ritual. Over the course of Trump’s time in office as an impeached, disgraced one-term President I came to know the avatars of the people highest in his mentions like they were members of my own immediate family. 

That dude who looks like Eric Clapton would of course respond to Trump’s latest tweet with righteous indignation. Patricia Arquette wouldn’t be far behind, acting as a rightly outraged citizen rather than a famous actress. 

That one!

On the other side would be an endless parade of MAGA chuds competing to see who could be the most obsequious. Trump could tweet that he just shat himself so hard that there’s poop in his shoes, and he had to go into a corner and cry in a fetal position, and also Hitler was right about everything and thousands of cultists would respond un-ironically with, “Best President ever!”, “MAGA!”, “My man OWNING the Libs” and “Trump 2020/2024.”

Now that pointless ritual is officially over. Trump’s anger is no longer fundamentally the engine that drives social media, and by extension the national discourse. 

We now have a president-elect who will use Twitter the way it is supposed to be used by the most powerful man in the world: in a boring, official capacity rather than as a white-hot poker to stick in the eyes of his enemies. 

banned!

Trump still has plenty of ways to communicate his feelings to the public. He can go on Newsmax or OAN or Tucker Carlson or Sean Hannity and bloviate as much as he’d like about stolen elections and social media censorship and Joe Biden being a Communist puppet for the Chinese and Bernie Sanders. 

But it won’t be the same. It won’t be as immediate, or as perpetually apoplectic as Trump’s Twitter tantrums. Trump will have to communicate with the public the way politicians and leaders have since time immemorial. 

I can’t even imagine how angry being banned from Twitter must make Trump feel, not to mention the rage he must be experiencing after soulless sycophants like Betsy Davos turned on him and his radioactive cult of personality 99.5 percent of the way through his term. 

But I know that Trump is miserable, in part because he cannot express that misery and anger the way he has before. So even though Trump is off Twitter for good, I still derive the same semi-guilty joy in his suffering that I did from reading his tweets. 

The world may be changing rapidly but my unseemly delight in Trump’s unhappiness remains the same. 

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