Trump ominously warns that Schiff will “have to answer for this” in veiled twitter threat
Picture Donald Trump waking up each morning and having to decide which weighty matter of governance he needs to address first.
Just kidding! Everyone knows that the first thing he likely does upon rising is to turn the TV onto Fox News, grab his phone, and start tweeting about his impeachment woes.
While future historians will need to collaborate with forensic psychologists to determine the nature of whatever deeply-rooted mental trauma motivates his obsessive-compulsive social media postings, a casual contemporary observer can safely assume that at least a portion of the Trump’s Twitter fixation these days is driven by the abject fear of being impeached and removed from the White House and losing the immunity from criminal indictment that he currently enjoys while still in office.
The intensity of the president’s social media compulsion was demonstrated this past Sunday when Trump sent over 100 tweets and retweets within the space of a day.
With that prodigious output, it’s obvious that Trump’s emphasis is on quantity, not quality and indeed, his posts have suffered from a repetitiveness that sees the same themes repeated endlessly as any skilled propagandist would suggest to effectively brainwash your audience.
Trump has even experimented with shorthand tweets of a single phrase — posted in a Tourette’s syndrome-like exclamation — that summarize familiar talking points without having to bother to include the complete back story of whatever lie he’s peddling.
He provided an example of that style this morning, plopped into his Twitter feed like a rest in musical notation or a palate cleanser in a gourmet meal.
WITCH HUNT!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) December 10, 2019
It’s a simple and effective tactic to spread his phony accusations about the investigations of his administration’s misdeeds despite the considerable evidence of boiling cauldrons strewn about the Oval Office.
Trump’s most frequent style of tweets these days, however, are those that attack his investigators and accuse them of being and doing all of the things of which he himself is most guilty.
This morning the president offered a prime example of this type of social media attack on his enemies with an assault on one of his favorite targets, House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff (D-CA).
Shifty Schiff, a totally corrupt politician, made up a horrible and fraudulent statement, read it to Congress, and said those words came from me. He got caught, was very embarrassed, yet nothing happened to him for committing this fraud. He’ll eventually have to answer for this!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) December 10, 2019
Although the actual content of Trump’s tweeted attacks on Congressman Schiff and his other opponents barely matters — after all, by this point we know better than to accept anything the president posts as true — it is worth pointing out that the incident Trump is describing consisted of Schiff reading a sarcastic paraphrasing of Trump’s supposedly “perfect” phone call with Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelensky that no one except the president interpreted as a literal quotation of his words.
Yet this tweet shows how Trump utilizes lies, projection, and distraction as his primary defenses against his own fraud, against the threat that he himself will be finally held accountable and have to answer for his criminal actions both while in office and in his prior business career.
On the surface, it’s just another out of thousands and thousands of tweets that Trump has posted, but — just as one can contemplate the vastness of the universe while meditating on a single grain of sand — this one tweet about Representative Adam Schiff contains every aspect of Donald Trump’s fearful, guilty, and vindictive mindset within the confines of the platform’s 280 character limit.
How wonderful it would be if that was the last tweet that Trump ever posted, but alas we can expect the president to fill our feeds with an endless stream of similar nuggets of malicious propaganda and falsehoods until his access to Twitter is forcibly terminated by either incarceration or a sudden change of policy by the social media giant.
Now that’s something that House Speaker Nancy Pelosi can add to her prayers.
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