Trump’s Twitter feed goes quiet for 15 hours before he resumes bleating about cheating
With the klieg lights of media attention shifting to the now-recognized President-Elect Joe Biden, Donald Trump did something very uncharacteristic last night.
He went 15 whole hours without posting a single tweet to social media.
Perhaps he was watching the networks call the election in Biden’s favor after the margin of the former vice president’s victory in Pennsylvania made Trump’s possibilities for hitting the magic number of 270 electoral votes mathematically impossible.
Perhaps he was viewing the extensive coverage of the spontaneous celebrations that broke out in the nation’s major urban centers where throngs of ecstatic people banged pots, honked horns, and danced on the current president’s metaphorical grave as the reality of the beginnings of a new political age and the end of our four-year nightmare began to permeate their psyches, so stressed and shattered by years of presidential abuses and the seemingly interminable wait for a victor to be declared after a nail-biting election night.
Perhaps he was huddling with his legal team after 1:54 PM yesterday when he posted this deluded tweet bragging about his losing vote total that was still more than four million fewer than Biden received, even after Trump rounded his number up.
71,000,000 Legal Votes. The most EVER for a sitting President!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) November 7, 2020
How many of the intervening hours between that post and 5:38 AM this morning when he next tweeted were spent speaking with advisors, donors, and lawyers to discuss how he was going to try to fight to reverse the results of the final votes tallies through accusations of fraud is not yet known, but apparently none of his advisors were able to convince him to accept defeat graciously.
Instead, Trump continued to make claims of a stolen election that were flagged by Twitter as disputed and tagged with links to copious information refuting the president’s persistent claims about the dangers of mail-in ballots.
….Supreme Court Justice to compel them to separate ballots that were received after the legislative deadline. It required the intervention of Justice Alito. That’s a large group of ballots. When you talk about systemic problems, it’s about…
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) November 8, 2020
…and Detroit with a long series of election problems (to put it mildly).” @JonathanTurley
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) November 8, 2020
Add your name to tell Trump: You Lost! Concede!
By quoting Jonathan Turley, one of the right-wing lawyers who testified on his behalf at his impeachment inquiry, Trump certainly ensured that his likely futile bleatings about cheating would at least be presented to the public in a literate and coherent series of words, despite the inauthenticity of their contents.
Trump soon followed that post up with another quote from one of his defenders — one whose appeal might perhaps better connect with his less-sophisticated followers than a Washington DC law professor — Newt Gingrich.
….Where it mattered, they stole what they had to steal. @newtgingrich
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) November 8, 2020
How ironic to have the man whose entire presidency has taken place under a cloud of suspicion that his surprise victory over Hillary Clinton in 2016 was the result of Russian electoral interference to be projecting his own accusations of ballot tampering and stolen elections.
Trump’s options for actually reversing the results of the election may be dwindling without any actual evidence of the type of massive fraud that he and his supporters are alleging, but to have any future as a political opposition force moving forward, his protestations will help instill a sense of grievance among his followers who already have an ingrained sense of resentment over their diminishing white privilege and will help him solicit donations to fund his legal challenges and retire his campaign debt.
Hopefully, the reduced volume of the president’s social media posts ushers in a new era of relative peace and tranquility on the feeds of Twitter followers around the globe.
As Trump’s words become increasingly irrelevant, the outrage that he will be able to generate through his posts will fall to undetectable levels and he will fade into obscurity while loudly proclaiming his victimhood.
In just a few short weeks, we’ll be able to ignore Donald Trump without consequence. and begin to truly make America great, if not again, then finally.
Follow Vinnie Longobardo on Twitter.
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