Of the many indignities of the Trump presidency, one of the most pernicious has been his willingness to lend a presidential cosign to tweets from the worst people online. He’s signal-boosted anti-semitic memes, conspiracy theorists, and violent, bottom-tier political cartoons. It’s all a function of his remarkable lack of shame and his ongoing quest for immediate validation, the sort of self-insulating echo chamber that leads to aides delivering positive press reports to his desk daily or continuing his campaign rallies even though, you know, he should be doing actual presidential work.
This morning, old “butterfingers” Trump smashed that RT for a man named Mike Holden, who, like so many Americans, derives a small source of joy by hopping in major news networks’ mentions to talk shit about our dumb president. Generally, beneath any news story about the president, comes a long tail of partisan bickering, memes, and name-calling, all of which coalesces to form the president’s view not just of himself but also of the American populace. And so it came to be that the 45th president of the United States informed his 36 million followers:
Did Trump mean to instead retweet the Fox & Friends story, which detailed Trump’s troubling comments about pardoning an Arizona sheriff convicted of racial profiling? Sure. He later undid the RT and instead posted the story above it, but the moment has been preserved in amber by Holden himself, who seems to be enjoying his new fame: