Donald Trump wields his Twitter audience like a cudgel, as if the 22 million people that choose to be privy to his various outrages and transparently staged photo-ops have a political mandate to do so. He confuses audience with approval, and, worse, he may be right. On Friday he received the greatest possible positive reinforcement for his belief that the angry little thing that lives in his brain is correct.
So it’s the least the Twitter-using public can do to follow @HalfOnionInABag, a Twitter account started on Friday that purports to literally be half of an onion in a plastic bag. The onion has been photographed:
Here is the onion, again:
Thus far, the onion only has 35 tweets—it has promised not to clog your feed with thirsty onion-related jokes. It is simply an uncooked onion, sitting in a bag, quietly accruing Twitter followers. It is doing so quickly, too: Yesterday it had over 100,000 users, and today it is at well over 200,000, meaning that it is about 1 percent of the way toward its goal. In the grand scheme of things, for all we talk about Trump’s Twitter account, he’s nowhere near the follower total of, say, Demi Lovato (40 million), and light years from his predecessor, Barack Obama, who has some 83 million followers.
And while following a half of an onion in a plastic bag on Twitter is probably the least effective means of resistance imaginable, it is also, as the bagged onion itself has pointed out, exactly the type of thing that would infuriate the 45th president of the United States, which means it is worth doing.
We better hurry, though. According to the National Onion Association, a cut onion only lasts about 7-10 days. Future photographs of the Twitter celebrity may get macabre.