A stream of needlessly cruel insults
The New York Times tries not to laugh at Trump’s Twitterstorm.
The tweets started around 3:20 a.m. on Friday. Inside Trump Tower, a restless figure stirred in the predawn darkness, nursing his grievances and grabbing a device that often lands him in hot water.
On his Android phone, Donald J. Trump began to tap out bursts of digital fury: He mocked Alicia Machado, a former Miss Universe and a popular Latin American actress, as a “con,” the “worst” and “disgusting.”
In a final flourish, before the sun came up, the Republican presidential nominee claimed — without offering any evidence — that she had appeared in a “sex tape.”
It’s ludicrous, and in that sense funny – but it’s also horrifying and not a bit funny. He’s a very powerful rich man, and he doesn’t hesitate to try to harm women he dislikes.
Over the past few days, those instincts have been on vivid display. In quick succession, Mr. Trump has repeated his critique that Ms. Machado gained a “massive amount of weight” after she won the Miss Universe crown in 1996; suggested that former President Bill Clinton’s infidelities are fair game for campaign attacks; and urged his followers to “check out” a sex tape that may not exist. (Ms. Machado appeared in a risqué scene on a reality television show, but fact-checkers have discovered no sex tape.)
Don’t elect a chronic bully to high office. Don’t do it. Step back from the edge.
Yet for close students of Mr. Trump’s career and campaign, it all has a familiar ring. Over the years, he has issued a stream of needlessly cruel and seemingly off-the-cuff insults — both on and off social media — that have inflamed the public. He declared on Twitter that Kim Novak, a reclusive 81-year-old actress at the time, “should sue her plastic surgeon,” sending her into hiding. He derided the appearance of a rival, Carly Fiorina, angering female voters by asking: “Can you imagine that, the face of our next president?” And he criticized the mother of a slain American soldier, musing that as a Muslim woman, she was not “allowed” to speak.
Don’t elect a cruel, mean, sadistic bully to high office.
On Friday, Mr. Trump was at it again between 3:20 and 5:30 a.m., issuing a series of indignant messages that mocked Ms. Machado and Mrs. Clinton, who raised the experience of the former beauty queen to hurt Mr. Trump during the debate.
Mrs. Clinton, he wrote “was duped and used by my worst Miss U. Hillary floated her as an “angel” without checking her past, which is terrible!”
A few minutes later, Mr. Trump theorized — again, without offering any evidence — that Mrs. Clinton had helped Ms. Machado become a United States citizen so that the Democratic nominee could mention the beauty queen in the debate to hurt Mr. Trump.
Don’t elect a cruel, mean, sadistic bully who makes up his own reality to high office.
It is unusual for a major party presidential nominee to directly control any online communications, let alone issue provocative, unsubstantiated claims without the filter of a campaign aide.
But Mr. Trump is fixated on Twitter. He has nearly 12 million followers and has reveled in watching his stray thoughts become viral sensations on the social media platform. He has been fond of quoting a fan on Twitter, who described him as “the Ernest Hemingway of a hundred and forty characters.”
[choking with laughter] Does that sound familiar? Does it remind you of anyone? Yes, it does. The two are quite similar in their Twitter habits.
So like a car careening down a highway with no guardrails, Mr. Trump on Friday sent out one message after another. His suggestion of a sex tape featuring Ms. Machado sent his most zealous followers hunting for images. A few of them posted pornographic images of women who they believe resembled Ms. Machado.
Ms. Machado on Friday called Mr. Trump’s online assault “cheap lies with bad intentions” and said that she would not be intimidated.
And millions of dudebros called her names on social media.
Don’t elect a hero of dudebros on social media to high office. Step back from the edge.
It’s amazing how he makes George W Bush and Reagan look good, because they had some manners and good humour.
Re: ‘It’s ludicrous, and in that sense funny – but it’s also horrifying and not a bit funny. He’s a very powerful rich man, and he doesn’t hesitate to try to harm women he dislikes…’
One of several things about the piece of (clears throat)…
He _is_ pathetic. And absurd. Seriously, you can imagine him awake all night, stewing, pissed, that he’s been bested, unable to sleep, and blasting this shit out. It’s more than a bit pathetic…
… but then it goes out to _millions_ of followers, who actually see him as the messiah he sells himself as.
I figure there are and have been through history a _lot_ of people like this. Not a few of them ran autocracies. Not a few of them founded religions. They look ridiculous, from far enough away. You can’t help but mock. But they’re incredibly dangerous, all the same.
It makes satire delicate. You take them too seriously, you give them power. You take them too unseriously, people underestimate them and those they’ve seduced. You _should_ mock them, you _have_ to mock them. But if that doesn’t inoculate those who are teetering on the edge of being taken, and break out of their spell those who have been already, bear this in mind: it only goes so far. Maybe it keeps the rest of us sane, in the face of the very real threat he is. _Maybe_, if it finally gets inside his narcissistic head and finally cracks his all-important, oblivious confidence, it gets you somewhere. But it isn’t enough, until then. If the world is to avoid these monsters, and the evil they _will_ do, we need to be able deftly to mock and to warn at the same time.
… and KB Player, re GWB especially:
One of the particularly unsettling things for me about this is how it adjusts your standards. I kid you not, I have not stopped despising GWB in the (thank you) eight years he’s been out of office. You try to move on, you still wake up swearing at him and all he represents. He. Tortured. People. And this was freshly attached to the legacy of our civilisation. Despising him, in my view, is entirely reasonable…
… and then rumours spread that, listen, his extended family is warming to Clinton. Realizing the unique threat that is this new demagogue, they’re making the wiser call, there, at least…
… and you get to thinking, okay, I can’t help but forgive, a little…
Mind, I’m not Maher Arar, personally.
I know. I’ve just worked out my desired outcome: I want him to be resoundingly rejected by the voters, and then drop dead. He’s a ticking bomb.
(Crosses fingers…)
Beyond this: I’m not totally settled yet on whether this is more about him or the times. To extend the metaphor: he _is_ a ticking bomb. But it’s also possible we’re also living in a room full of gunpowder.
It’s a question has always tickled the back of my brain. There’s this assumption I think we have that for a Hitler or a Mussolini or a Stalin we also need a crisis, a meltdown, widespread disillusionment…
… I’m less sure about this of late than I’d like to be. I’m starting to suspect: it may be you can always find something to cook up into sufficient energizing rage.
… but then, on the opposite hand: the larger framework I work from: I kinda figure the current level of maturity of the globalized economy is a bit like what we had in the early industrial revolution. We’ve rearranged things this drastic, destabilizing way because telecom and transportation capabilities make it entirely possible, and there’s money there, and people always find their way to that. But the bits of government and society that make it eventually liveable and relatively egalitarian haven’t caught up. It’s the robber baron phase, the dark satanic mill phase.
The obvious thing that occurs to me: we probably _do_ just need more global coordination on the standards that (relatively) civilised industrial economies, once upon a time, found their way toward. But that’s a pretty difficult place to get to, from here…
And yes, knuckle-dragging phobics, that ‘world government’ that terrifies you probably is one of the ways this could be done… But not really my favoured approach, if this at all reassures you…
It’s a thing about government: scaling is nontrivial. We’ve known this, implicitly, a while. What we may need _is_ probably a bit like a democratic republic between governments, cultures. Instead of levelling it out, making all of us the same, somehow, we have to get standards to where it’s workable between us, _and_ preserve interesting cultural differences.
… this a bit of a digression. But it’s another notion I’m working on: knowing what you’re against _and_ for, you need to keep both in your head. I think, in part, that’s why Trump and his minions have _not_ entirely triumphed, as yet. They’re opposing people who don’t merely oppose them, but have ideas of their own about how things should work. So it’s also important to keep these in view.
Who is he similar to in Twitter habits? Milo?
Dawkins.