Two Tweets
After the election that enshrined his brand-name bigotry as the future of the U.S., one of Donald Trump’s first tweets said, “Just had a very open and successful presidential election. Now professional protesters, incited by the media, are protesting. Very unfair!”
Nine hours later, a second, modulated tweet appeared under his name. It said, “Love the fact that the small groups of protesters last night have passion for our great country. We will all come together and be proud!”
The first tweet was not deleted. Those two tweets are together still, the yin and the yang of the Trump machine. It is my contention that the pairing is no accident. This is exactly how Trump works. Since the election, moderates on the right and left have expressed hope that the system that allowed Trump’s rise will be the system to contain it. However, it is in the contradictions that Trump is effective.
The First Tweet
Trump’s first tweet refers to “professional protesters” who were “incited by the media.” This isn’t just a smear: it’s a smear that contradicts itself. “Professional protesters” suggests paid protesters, actors, who are not really motivated by their beliefs, but are present to perform a job. We already know that Trump projects his own faults and actions onto his opponents, and this would seem like a pretty simple example of that. The Trump campaign opened with an announcement attended by paid actors.
So it is a projection. But it’s not just a projection. It provides the first of the two targets in the tweet. Fake protesters are worse than real protesters, because they don’t really have any beliefs for which they stand. They are in it for the cash and not for real reasons; they are corrupt. As is the second target, the media.
The media can’t be inciting fake protesters, of course. If the protesters aren’t motivated by ideals, then they won’t care what the media says. But this contradiction isn’t a mistake. It is part of an effort to sustain the Trumpite rage that swept his campaign to power in the first place. If the protesters are corrupt, this provides two very neat and contradictory solutions to real political division.
- The division isn’t real, because the response to it isn’t real. Trumpites are the real America(ns) and protesters are paid shills.
- The division is very real, and the legitimate election results of the real America(ns) are in danger from a corrupt enemy.
In other words, the media is the propaganda wing of a fake-but-very-real enemy.
If you don’t buy into Trump, the first tweet is one of his usual messy lies, easy to see through, easy to see in relation to his many other lies and contradictions. But if you don’t buy into Trump, then he isn’t talking to you. He does not care what you think. It does not matter that the people who already oppose Trump view his statements as hypocritical and untrue and cynical.
If you do buy into Trump, chances are that you, too, thought that President Obama was an illegitimate president. Putting Trump’s previous calls for revolution when he believed (falsely) that Romney won the popular vote next to this tweet, as I’ve seen from many lefties on Twitter and Facebook, is only speaking to other lefties.
For people who buy into Trump, it is literally proving the point. Just because propaganda doesn’t work on you personally, it doesn’t mean it isn’t working. Sharing these images with each other helps solidify in-group solidarity, but sharing them broadly does Trump’s work for him. The same images that lefties share to prove one point are shared by people on the right as evidence of their own rectitude.
A few weeks ago, there was an image that was going around. You may have seen it. It looked like this.
When I saw these maps, I was suspicious, because I couldn’t see anything on them indicating where the numbers came from. In particular, I was suspicious of the way Oregon stays blue in nearly every single projection, despite its history as a white supremacist state and a state in which a right wing extremist can be voted into power, power the voters reiterated this past Tuesday. Because I didn’t know where the numbers came from, I couldn’t be sure whether I was just wrong about them, or if the numbers themselves were wrong. So I conducted a reverse image search of the maps.
I never found where they started, and I’m still not sure where the numbers came from. What I did find were many instances of that image on overtly white supremacist websites. Lefties had been sharing the image as evidence of how important non-white voting blocs are to the left. White supremacists were sharing it for the same reason, but in their version, it represented the illegitimate voter blocs unfairly pushing white people out of power.
The same image can do opposite work with the same point. Lefties sharing Trump’s hypocrisies need to understand this. It doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t share them, but we need to understand what it is actually doing.
The Second Tweet
When the second tweet was posted, the one that praises the passion of the protesters, some responses framed this as a correction by Trump’s staff to the first tweet. I retweeted a post by Jörgen Camrath that said “It took his staff just nine hours to convince him that the first tweet wasn’t appropriate for a President-elect. This is going to be great.” It struck me as true and bleakly funny.
But then I thought to look at Trump’s timeline and realized that the first tweet was still up. Those tweets are still sitting right next to one another on the President-Elect’s timeline. The first tweet would have been taken down if someone who had control of the narrative thought it wasn’t working.
Instead, those two tweets are aimed at two very different audiences and even their presence next to one another works at that. Notice that the second tweet is not written in Donald Trump’s voice. This is deliberate. The first tweet is for believers and the second tweet can be dismissed by those believers, because it clearly wasn’t written by Trump, and therefore isn’t what he means.
For people who hope a Trump presidency will be more moderate than his campaign, the second tweet reminds readers that he has more conventional advisors to guide him. When he shoots from the hip, calmer, more reasonable people will step in and take control of the situation. Readers of the second tweet who hope for signs of moderation can dismiss the first tweet.
Next to each other, these tweets speak what two groups of people who can be useful to Trump want to hear. Keep in mind that the second group does not have to actually support Trump to be useful to him. To quote writer Caro Kinkead, “…if they can talk themselves or others out of action, that furthers [Trump’s] cause.”
Moderates should stop hoping that Trump will not be as bad as he’s said he will be. He views supporters as legitimate and all others as enemies. For all his lies and contradictions, he’s been remarkably consistent in his embrace of bigotry. When a bully says that he will hurt you, that is the one instance in which you can be sure he is telling the truth.
During the primary, pundits talked about how Trump would be forced to move to the center if he went on to the general. He never did. Asked on Friday if he took the rhetoric too far during the campaign, he responded with, “No. I won.”
Here are some things that the president-elect has done since his win was announced: reinstated his call for a Muslim ban on his website, put together a list of reactionary right-wing potential cabinet officials, and failed to issue a rebuke to those of his supporters who are directly attacking immigrants and other marginalized populations, even as reports of hate crimes rise to higher levels than post-9/11. On Tuesday, Trump surrogate Omarosa told the Independent Journal Review that the Trump campaign is keeping an enemies list.
Trump may enjoy cheering crowds and may not want to do the real work of governing, but to think that because he is malleable and vain he will mug for our approval is naïve at best. He does not dance for the out-group, and if you oppose(d) him, you are in the out-group. Complacency and hope for a moderate Trump will only serve Trump.
