Cartoon bad guy and also real-world bad guy Donald Trump is a historically prolific user of social media and also a historically inept user of technology. Let us never shake from our minds the image of Kellyanne Conway teaching him to use a computer, or any of the ample evidence that suggests that he does not know how to use a computer. His embrace of Twitter is not a function of his commercial of cultural savvy but instead of his own id, as it provides a place for his various insecurities and feuds to be magnified, affirmed, cajoled, enflamed, and reinforced. He does not understand Twitter; it is to Twitter’s infinite demerit that it accommodates him so well.
Unlike, say, Facebook, which strives to transcend language and age in its user-friendliness, Twitter is full of winks, secret handshakes, and subtle insults—subtweets, screen-capped subtweets, sarcastic over-usage of commas, real-name in-joke tribalism, the retweet and quoted retweet and classic retweet, and so on. One such technique is the threaded tweet, which is when you reply to yourself but then delete your name, such that any link to one of the tweets in the (shiver) “tweetstorm” will appear as part of a thread with all of the other tweets. It is essentially a way to continue a thought beyond 140 characters without (shiver) creating a Medium post about it.
Donald Trump has generally just carried his thoughts between tweets via ellipses or by numbering them, but today, as Gizmodo reports, he figured out how to do a threaded tweet. Here it is, with the first part of its thread right on top. Be proud of our boy!
Unfortunately, this is not a correct use of the threaded tweet, as the two sentiments have no logical connection outside of the fact that they both emanated in a staccato burst from the enfeebled mind of our standing president. The first is a by-the-numbers grouse about the media treating him unfairly, and the second is a refutation of the fact that literally nobody likes his shitty new health care bill. Add that failure to his failures to spell “tap,” to back up his claims of being wiretapped, to make a St. Patrick’s Day hat, to “drain the swamp,” and now to thread a goddamn tweet, and you’ve got a succinct portrait of the first two months of the Donald Trump presidency.
Note: Gizmodo, like The A.V. Club, is owned by Univision Communications.