In some ways, it had seemed like Trump was receding into the sort of normal shitty republican president we know—a doddering, senile figure honking the proverbial truck horn while the conservative apparatus around him tirelessly worked to consolidate wealth and sell it as salvation to the very people they were consolidating it from.
But no: Trump is mad again. Not only did he take the unprecedented step of firing FBI Director James Comey, under the ostensible justification that he had bungled the investigation into Hillary Clinton’s emails, an effort for which Trump praised him repeatedly on the campaign trail. The president also, with the sort of open antagonism and malevolently counterfactual phrasing that has become the signature Trump administration tone, thanked Comey in the letter firing him for having told Trump he is not being investigated for his ties to Russia, something that has dogged him since the election and which is seeming increasingly less like a conspiracy theory and much more like the type of thing we can finally impeach this blood-sucking clown over, a scant four months into his presidency.
The immediate response from politicians on both sides of the aisle has been repudiation of the president’s actions, and, accordingly, it has been met online with the exasperated banshee shriek that is the only logical response to this presidency. Hashtags such as #ImpeachTrumpNow, #AfterTrump, and #DonaldTrumpIsLyingAgain are, inevitably, making it to the eyes of our fickle commander in chief, in part because he is a mentally unwell, TV-addled baby 70-year-old. He is online, and he is mad. Early this morning, presumably up at his usual time to go tinkle and watch the first hour of Fox And Friends while shoveling meatloaf into his mouth, Trump began the sort of bitter Twitter screed that is, at this point, his signature domestic achievement. He began on an appropriately cartoon-villain tone:
That sadness could be less about the figure of Comey himself and more about the fact that Trump fired him just days before he was set to testify before the House Intelligence Committee about Russian meddling in the election, but whatever, Trump was mad, and he moved on to his ’80s Gecko-suited entrepreneur tone:
He then retweeted a Drudge Report aggregation of a CNN story, seemingly to demonize Mexicans, because why not:
He then moved back to his assurances, obviously to himself, that eventually everyone will like him, that he will be a good, well-liked president who definitively will not be impeached less than a year after taking office or imprisoned in a trans-dimensional prism along with Kellyanne Conway and Steve Bannon and shot into space like the antagonists of Superman:
Finally, after retweeting another Drudge Report link that seemingly supported the firing of Comey, he lashed out at Senator Richard Blumenthal, repeating a completely irrelevant claim that he falsified stories about his service in Vietnam, when in fact he exaggerated them, something Trump cannot even do, because he has never served a day of public service in any capacity and likes to save his lies for more important things, like, say, 9/11. For dessert, he tweeted this:
This is, of course, Trump accusing CNN of being fake news just moments after retweeting its story about Mexico, leading you to believe that, perhaps, he is not actually consuming this news but merely repurposing the links. As the threat of impeachment looks increasingly real—here is a somewhat optimistic primer on the pragmatic steps that would need to be taken to do so—Trump will continue to melt down online. We are only steps away from another hours-long, freewheeling press-conference meltdown, or perhaps nuclear war, whichever sounds most enticing to him after his meatloaf lunch and an afternoon nap. All that tweeting takes the old guy’s energy.