Donald Trump and the Mean Tweets Fallacy
As one of our many obnoxious online rituals, whenever Joe Biden does something that Conservatives consider awful and beyond reproach, they sarcastically take to social media to sarcastically assert that Biden might literally be a cross between Hitler and Satan but oh thank heavens we got rid of the old guy because of his “mean tweets.”
The Democratic equivalent of this is to reply to Donald Trump’s myriad transgressions with a sarcastic cry of, “But her emails!” As is generally the case, these two tongue-in-cheek rejoinders are roughly analogous but the Conservative version is more dishonest, hypocritical and disingenuous.
“But her emails!” argues implicitly that Hillary Clinton, an extremely qualified candidate who had more or less prepared for being our first female president her entire life, was defeated by a comically, cartoonishly unqualified buffoon in no small part because her opponent succeeded in tricking a big chunk of the American public into thinking that what MIGHT be in a group of deleted emails is far worse than everything we absolutely know to be true about Donald Trump.
This is an over-simplification but there’s an element of truth to it. The same cannot be said of the Mean Tweets fallacy.
Americans love the archetype of the rough around the edges maverick who doesn’t play by the rules and pisses off corrupt authority figure but gets results. That’s why they are ubiquitous in mismatched buddy cop movies.
But we adore this concept in myriad other fields as well because it plays to our innate national obsession with individualism and success at all costs. Let the Commies and the Bolsheviks work together for the sake of the common good while diligently following the rules. That’s not how we do it in God’s own United States.
Think of the musician or actor who is blasted out of their minds on drugs and arrogant and narcissistic yet creates art and entertainment that captures the public imagination. Or the superstar athlete who is hated by his teammates as well as his opponents but wins championship after championship.
As a businessman as well as a politician, Trump branded himself along these lines. He was coarse. He was crude. He said and did things that people found offensive and appalling. Yet no one could deny that, like a cop who doesn’t respect the rights of criminals or the feelings of his partner, goddamnit, the MAN GOT RESULTS.
He was a billionaire, wasn’t he? Who is more successful than a billionaire? A trillionaire? Spellcheck doesn’t even recognize that as a word.
Except that Trump wasn’t anywhere near as successful as a real estate developer and entrepreneur as he angrily insisted. He regularly declared bankruptcy. His businesses had a funny way of failing miserably. Yet he nevertheless succeeded in branding himself as the epitome of gold-plated American success.
Trump’s methods were crude and vulgar, “politically incorrect’ and coarse. Yet he nevertheless succeeded in shocking and horrifying the world by being elected President in 2016. In that respect, it certainly could be said that Trump didn’t play by the rules and did things his own way yet succeeded in snagging the biggest job in the world.
The twice-disgraced ex-president continued to play by his own rules as president. For example he defiantly fought the conventional wisdom that the President of the United States should not spend his days watching FOX News, eating Big Macs and insulting everyone he considers his enemy via social media.
Trump played by his own rules, and continues to play by his own rules, yet he most assuredly did not get results. Nor did he succeed in any real sense. True, the obscenely wealthy did quite well during Trump’s presidency, and the stock market soared.
But in seemingly every other way, Trump’s presidency was a nadir for our country and possibly civilization as a whole. Yet the MAGA crowd clings to the delusion that Trump was such a spectacular success as Commander in Chief that the only POSSIBLE criticism that could be levied against him was that he was a little crude.
The implication is that no one in their right mind could possibly argue with the substance of Trump’s time in office so they have to complain about his insouciant style.
“Mean tweets” became shorthand for everything crude and coarse and egregiously unpleasant about Trump’s personal stye. But it was never just about the mean tweets. The mean tweets were but an expression of the ugliness, cruelty and narcissism at Trump’s core.
Even if the worst Trump did as president was single-handedly lower the level of discourse in American politics and further divide an already fractured nation, that would still be huge, a sad, traumatic and destructive legacy.
It’s not about the mean tweets. It’s about the person who used to tweet them and what they say about him and how he sees the world.
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