Earlier today, Donald Trump woke up and did what most Americans do upon waking up: He reached for his phone and immediately started posting about shit that made him angry. Today the object of his ire was CNN, who recently retracted a thinly sourced story alleging collusion between a Trump-adjacent hedge-fund manager and a Russian investment fund. Because we know that the only that powers him through the day is checking his Twitter mentions, but probably has learned to filter them to only see verified ones these days, his eye was caught by the following tweet, which he then retweeted:
Jeff Tutorials, it turns out, is a 16-year-old YouTuber who specializes in Grand Theft Auto Online hacks. (Mostly, they detail how to game the system for more money.) The Daily Beast got Mr. Tutorials, who refused to give his last name, on the horn, and the result is deeply indicative of the state of American politics, or at least the state of American political Twitter:
“I do YouTube videos actually completely different from politics. I really don’t do anything political in my life other than Twitter,” he told The Daily Beast. “I do gaming informational videos so it really has nothing to do with politics.”
But he’s a keen follower of the news and shares the president’s disdain for mainstream media, even tweeting that The Daily Beast was a “fake news outlet” before the interview took place.
Both the retweet and the Daily Beast story have been passed around with great delight on Twitter, but Tutorials has hit back:
What makes this all dispiriting is not Tutorials, a garden-variety gamer who could be any anonymous angry young man online, but the president, who we know absorbs almost all of his information via Fox News and Twitter, who is surrounded by sycophants, and who turns for counsel to whoever pops up in his mentions. He is a deeply stupid man, and he is uninterested in leavening that deep stupidity with wiser counsel. A president who talks to teenagers is commendable; a president who thinks they are clever is horrifying.