The Dork Lord
In opposing an internet presidency, it helps to understand the basics of online psychology and 4chan politics.
We’re nine years into the internet presidency of Donald Trump, and we’re still treating it like the offline world. While a number of commentators have observed the Democrats’ stubborn refusal to acknowledge the passing of legacy print and network news, not enough has been said about the damp handprints of internet losers guiding our president or his instinctive imitation of the worst person you ever met on a message board — and how that must be ridiculed accordingly.
Granted, there has been some encouraging movement on this last front. Both J.P. Hill and Rebecca Shaw have done excellent work in the field of “These Guys Are Losers.” And even old media has been able to note that Elon Musk and his fake Department of Government Efficiency have blanketed Trump’s second term in the stench of internet. But it’s accurate to say that the rest of us have been yanked unwillingly into this Dweeb Narnia of online psychology.
Anyone who has spent years on a message board or online group has already seen this executive branch at work. Trump behaves like a standard troll king, the prime topical and emotional mover in an internet community, whose power derives from other people assuming that he has it, and who act accordingly, whether to preemptively silence themselves or dogpile the target of the day. Musk, meanwhile, serves as the board/group administrator who technically wields power, but is terrified of the popular will as manipulated by that troll. Unable to buy a laugh or goodwill, Musk can only try to punish average users who ridicule him while he waits for the big guy to say which way the wind is blowing that day.
It seems insulting to compare the American republic to the low-stakes social universe of online communities, but there are two things to bear in mind. First, whether it’s an online community or a bully pulpit, any system run by a bully depends on a community belief in that bully’s power to function. Second, there is a significant body of evidence that this is already the way these idiots think about things.
Trump behaves like a standard troll king.
The closest figure the online right has to a philosopher is Curtis Yarvin, a gnarly shut-in whose every picture of him indoors screams, “I know it smell crazy in there.” (To drive that point home, he used to call himself “Moldbug.”) Whether he wants to admit it or not, Yarvin’s origin story for cleaving to the redemptive power of tech dictatorship is that he lost his mind somewhere at the start of Eternal September, when too many college students started joining online bulletin boards, ruining his nerd clubhouse and demonstrating the failure of democracy by outnumbering him with voices different from his. Say what you will about examining the executive branch through a subreddit metaphor, but at least it’s not your ethos.
Stripped of context, this stuff is actually funny. A good message board troll is someone who can convince everyone one day to change their names to “Butthole Patrolman [number],” flex for 24 hours on that, then spend the next day insulting everyone who did as he said. The exercise generates value from reifying that compliance doesn’t exempt the masses from punishment, and that the best attitude toward their obligations is a semi-ironic detachment; only in this way can yesterday be celebrated or castigated depending on its utility today. This is more or less the same thing you’re laughing at when Trump addresses a crowd and confesses, essentially, “I don’t care about any of this trans stuff, but you pigs squeal loudest for that slop, so I’ll keep feeding it to you.” Or when Musk gets tapped to run a fake executive department despite Trump dunking him and his ”rocketships to nowhere” on Truth Social.
Things get depressing when you place a political context around this mechanism, because this is the rhetorical caprice that’s somehow routed Democrats for eight years. Stunned by their 2016 loss, they’ve striven to find a rational through line to what is essentially a wet teenaged geriatric feeling himself. Since then, they’ve followed their polling in search of the Trump word-hose effluent whose condemnation would be most broadly unobjectionable and amplified for days or weeks in hopes that a coalition of the offended would gather behind them. And, each time, Trump’s lapped them in an airboat, pushing a new day’s worth of filth over the side every hour and drowning out their droning on about what already sounded like last-month’s news. Like the war in Iraq, or an artificial intelligence that’s already cost $200 billion; maybe this’ll work next year.
In the absence of a political opposition with a clear, comprehensive agenda and a willingness to attempt to control the news cycle, this is at best a pathetic exercise. Confronting a guy who can ad-lib his way on the road to 20 different apocalypses before lunchtime with a single piece of last week’s news makes it look like he’s the only person in power who can walk and chew gum at the same time. It also perennially cedes the initiative of a single topic to him after ceding every other unaddressed assertion. Without, you know, an actual agenda, the solution in real life has always been the same as online: An unhesitating and immediate, “Fuck you,” followed by a gesture to the crowd of, “Get a load of this idiot loser,” without performing a simpering understanding of why someone might heed an idiot loser.
Despite his literal power, Trump cannot simply ignore this sort of dismissive insult, and he can’t lash out at it without highlighting all the gaps in his omnipotence. Unfortunately for people dependent on wielding the perception of power, there’s little they can do to shore it up without simultaneously acknowledging how tenuous it is. A silent Trump can be written off as too weak to have a comeback, but a furious one has been gotten to: He got mad, and the absence of a material follow-up to that anger only reveals his functional impotence. There’s an internet term for when someone unwittingly reveals how hard they have to work to maintain their authority, and it is care. If Kamala Harris proved nothing else in their debate, it’s that Trump cares a whole lot. As JD Vance might say from a particularly erotic Oval Office couch: You’re care and real mad, sir.
You can tell that Trump understands some of this implicitly; it is responsible at least in part for the fact that he reflexively condemns most criticisms and criminal investigations as conspiracies. That his enemies have to go to so much effort (read: care) not only reveals their inauthenticity, but also their weakness. If he weren’t already telling the truth, he wouldn’t need to say more than declare they have no proof. If they were telling the truth, they wouldn’t have to explain.
Put simply, then, it’s time to stop wondering which Trump statements are sincere, and which ones provide the optimal target for demographically friendly, agenda-nonspecific messaging. Because what he’s saying — about DEI fires or death windmills or polycules in schools — is not worthy of setting the tone for the day, the month or the future of the Republic. All but Trump’s absolute die-hards concede that they can like the man despite knowing that some of what he says is dumber than a bag of hammers. The trick is acting like it’s hammers all the way down and creating a permission structure that neither begs forgiveness nor panders to prejudice nor performs empathy but encourages people to notice that all the non-losers are walking thataway.
It’s time to stop wondering which Trump statements are sincere.
Alongside the concept of the “truth sandwich” — that the media and Democrats should rebut Trump’s lies by telling the truth first and last, with the lie in the middle — Trump needs to be fed a daily diet of shit sandwiches. I’m wasting my breath if I think the media is going to do this, but every Democrat possible should weigh in on any topic with the actual problem and an actual solution, first and last, with the middle set aside for mentioning that what Trump has to offer is a steaming slab that he’s welcome to swallow, but that nobody else will. (If some conservatives want to make shirts that say “I Swallow Shit,” let them.)
If the entire rest of his life is any guide, Trump will not be able to restrain himself. He won’t have the discipline to respond to attacks from Democratic backbenchers by directing his ire at their leadership; if anything, their low Q-rating will invite conspicuous overreaction to themselves and their proposed solutions. Within weeks at most, he’ll have put himself inside a mob, having already publicly ridiculed every possible option for escaping being the guy standing at the dead center of failure. He’ll take up residence again as the president everyone wishes would “get off Twitter” while bleeding through his monthly “one good line” quota with 29 days left in it. When he changes the subject, everyone should slam him for being a chickenshit, and slam the new thing, too. Words are free, and online has no print limit.
None of this should happen in a vacuum. Congressional Democrats need to maximally resist the Trump administration, throwing up every roadblock possible and hammering the same basic messages about the biggest crises over and over. They need a comprehensive agenda of their own, from cops to courts to boardrooms to operating rooms. But the critical first steps are abandoning the presumption that Trump is all-powerful, refusing to cede the debate to his terms, and refusing to take him seriously, even if the effects of his acts are grave.
It’s helpful of Trump to illustrate just how much the problems of being a tyrant and a troll are the same, even if he remains far more the latter. Someone is all powerful until the moment they aren’t, and most of the time people don’t notice when that moment is coming. One day, the majority complies, and then one day it doesn’t. But it takes an actual effort to expose to everyone lurking in the background all the ways that a troll makes himself look weak. The surest way to make Trump appear as the First Dork in an Empire of Dorks — who takes advice from wormy wet-handed guys who look like they can’t score with their own escort — is to treat him and his underlings like the lying dorks they are, every day, about every stupid thing they say and do. Surround them and taunt them and ridicule them. If Trump wants to spin in a circle repeating over and over how cool he is, well, okay. Good luck with that.
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