Trump’s Beef With Twitter is as Stupid as it is Pointless

Twitter is a garbage platform and I don’t recommend using it. As evidence of my claim, I offer the fact that the President of the United States is so mad that the company correctly labeled his tweets about mail-in voting as bullshit that he’s threatening to fundamentally break the internet in order to get the company to not call him out on his bullshit.

Trump is set to issue an executive order that, near as I can tell, instructs a bunch of agencies to do a bunch of shit that either they can’t do or probably won’t mean that Twitter can’t fact check his tweets and amounts to a big ol’ bowl of nothing soup . Essentially, the moment Trump attempts to sign this executive order, the administration will immediately get sued, it’ll get mired in red tape, and Trump will push the limits of executive power again. Even the Supreme Court’s Conservative judges will balk at the idea of breaking the first amendment so Trump can use Twitter however he pleases. Assuming it even gets that far.

Donald Trump deciding to go to war with Twitter because it lightly criticized some tweets he made is like Wile E. Coyote threatening to sue ACME because he keeps purchasing products that back fire on him, but refuses to stop buying them anyway. Trump is still going to use Twitter to criticize Twitter, because Twitter is the only public facing place where the President can say shit and not have to answer questions or really suffer anything in the way of consequences.

Twitter fact checked Trump’s dubious claims about mail-in voting, but the company has not fact checked Trump’s unfounded and baseless claims that Joe Scarborough was involved in the death of a former aide. Trump’s feed is basically entirely made up of mistrust and lies and misinformation; it would take years for Twitter to fact check literally everything wrong he’s said.

So what, exactly, is the point of this? Is Trump trying to hurt Twitter? Once again, harming Twitter in any sort of meaningful way just winds up hurting him in the long run, though Trump has a memory like a goldfish and is used to setting himself up for brutal self-owns. Is he trying to force Twitter to let him continue to spread misinformation unabated? He was already doing that, and again, Twitter has made no moves to fact check his Joe Scarborough conspiracy tweets or literally anything else he’s done.

Or is the point to gin up fears that there is a massive liberal conspiracy to censor conservative opinions? If that’s the case, I’d like to ask conservatives a simple question;

How is it possible that there’s a vast, multi-layered, well-monied, decades long conspiracy funded by tech companies like Facebook, Google and Twitter and liberal billionaires like George Soros and Warren Buffett, masterminded by manchurian candidate Barack Obama and some other unknown forces…and yet the President of the United States is a Conservative, the Senate is controlled by Republicans despite representing less of America than the Democrats do, the Supreme Court is run by conservatives, the federal court system is run by Conservatives, almost all the government’s numerous departments and agencies are run by conservatives, every single tech company is hesitant as balls to deplatform conservatives because conservative views bring in big dollars, CNN and MSNBC and the Washington Post and tons of other allegedly liberal corporations have employed conservatives on staff, and conservatives more or less own or run every major corporation in the country this side of Amazon?

It seems to me like if there is this massive conspiracy to stop conservative opinions, conservatives would have to be the dumbest fucking people in the world to not be able to stop something so blatantly obvious. If all of this shit is true, it should be easy to lock up Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama and basically anyone else involved in the conspiracy. Again, conservatives control the courts. There’s less of you and yet you’re in control of every branch of our federal government except the House of Representatives.

Either Conservatives are too weak to blow these conspiracies out of the water and actually lock people behind bars for actual crimes, or it’s all a bunch of made up horseshit. There, quite literally, is not a third way forward that does not involve Conservatives basically allowing a conspiracy to undermine them to continue, costing them power and harming their own legitimacy.

Is Trump going to stop using Twitter in protest of their unfair treatment? Fuck no he isn’t. Again, it’s the one platform where he has the ability to say what he wants with relatively little blowback.

All Trump is doing is having a fucking tantrum over yet another thing he cannot control. Trump can’t fathom a federal government in which he is not able to do whatever he wants whenever he pleases. (Trump is also too cowardly to be a dictator or authoritarian because then decisions for doing shit would be able to be blamed on him, and it’s hard to be an effective dictator when you blame your failings on everyone around you acting independently beyond your control.)

And also, blowing up at Twitter allows him to continue to dodge questions about the fact that 100,000 people (and counting!) have died from COVID-19 while he continues to push states to re-open in a bid to have the economy looking halfway decent by the time November comes around.

I assume that his distraction technique is a happy accident and not anything that approximates an actual strategy, because Trump doesn’t have one. How do I know Trump doesn’t have a strategy? Because a world wherein Twitter has less influence is a world where Trump’s words mean less and where he’d have to step in front of actual cameras and actual humans and speak like a coherent human, which he’s incapable of.

So, in short, don’t use Twitter because it sucks, and don’t pay attention to the giant crybaby talking about how fact checking his tweets is unfair, because it accidentally gives him the very distraction he needs to ignore all the blood on his tiny, tiny hands.