If you felt a sudden, unexplained lightening of your spirit this afternoon—at roughly 5:55 p.m. CT—you’re not alone. For roughly three minutes today, Donald Trump’s tyranny over Twitter—that smartphone pulpit from which he presidentially attacks professional athletes, his own appointed officials, and pretty much anybody who’s ever slighted him, ever—suddenly vanished, leaving the online world a warmer, gentler place.
But only for a moment. Even as Twitter began to fill with images of an @realDonaldTrump page consisting of nothing but the most beautiful “Sorry, that page doesn’t exist!” message ever seen, and exultant cries of freedom and “WTF?!” rang out, Trump’s tweets suddenly reappeared, like the world’s shittiest digital magic trick.
Still, we’ll always have the .gifs to remind us of those few blissful moments, even as the online world looks all the darker for this maddening, ephemeral glimpse at what might have been.