Trump just got impeached for making a perfect phone call and spawned some very good memes
On Thursday, the Senate formally began its impeachment trial of our president, Donald J. Trump. Trump responded with a perfect tweet that declared he “JUST GOT IMPEACHED FOR MAKING A PERFECT PHONE CALL.”
That call, of course, was the July 25 one between him and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, in which Trump urged Zelensky to investigate his political rivals, specifically former Vice President Joe Biden. So, no, his call was not perfect. This tweet, however, is. At least in the pantheon of Trump tweets. Because there are bad Trump tweets, such as when he stirs up racist sentiment via false or out-of-context claims. There are Fox News retweets/quotes, of course. There are boring tweets, clearly not written by him. But then there are good tweets, like when he calls his opponents things like “Little Marco” and “Mini Mike,” which is just objectively funny.
This is a perfect tweet, though. It literally only makes Trump look bad, serving as a pitch-perfect representation of Trump’s entire crusade of transparent, put-upon victimhood, this blubbery, clenched-fist, foot-stomping whininess. As AOC so perfectly puts it, it exudes “very strong ‘Mom, yell at my teacher to bump my grade up’ energy.”
It’s also endlessly malleable in terms of its memeability, which was proven almost immediately as a variety of different meme formats glommed onto the tweet. There’s the Trump-inspired classic, of course:
And the “let’s put this in historical context” set-up:
But, like all perfect statement tweets, it also lent itself to the “roses are red” format, resulting in a number of literary triumphs.