August 18, 2022

A classless confrontation just erupted in the Rose Garden during Trump’s “social media summit”

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President Trump held an absolute travesty of a “summit” today by inviting a rogues’ gallery of fringe internet trolls, professional grievance artists, and right-wing grifters to the seat of American power, the White House.

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The event became a scandal as soon as it was announced and the execrable guest list released. In the face of widespread backlash, the administration disinvited anti-semitic conspiracy theorist cartoonist Ben Garrison. From this inauspicious start, things were fated to get even worse.

Photos of the “social media summit” have emerged and they’re every bit as pathetic as one would expect. One shows a printed out and enlarged Trump tweet from 2012, a sad reminder that our president’s unhealthy social media habit has been around for quite some time now. Other photos display definitions of words like “deplatforming” and “shadow banning,” buzzwords that fit into the unfounded right-wing complaints that conservatives are being treated unfairly on social media.

The far simpler explanation is that right-wingers are the users most likely to share racist or otherwise offensive messages online, which in turn violate the terms of service for most websites and lead to punitive action. There is no reason to believe these people are being targeted for partisan reasons.

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When it was finally time for Trump to address his gathering of troglodytic digital denizens he launched quickly into complaining about his number of Twitter followers, painting himself as the victim of some coordinated silencing campaign. In reality, Twitter regularly removes fake users, bots, and accounts that violate their rules.

At one point, a fly buzzed around the president’s face and he flailed at it graciously, whining about how he doesn’t “like flies.” The image itself was almost Biblical, as this man who has become a metastisized rot at the heart of our democracy is a walking embodiment of pestilence.

Soon after, Trump lied (as he always does) and said that Democrats want to bring communism to the United States. All Democrats really want is to balance this country so that the super-rich don’t control every aspect of American life and the average citizen gets an equal say in their government. Opposing oligarchal rule does not make one a communist.

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The president ended his comments by acknowledging that some of those in attendance might have deserved to be banned from social media, an accurate assessment given that many of them are unhinged, basement-dwelling psychopaths.

After Trump concluded his laughable speech, things went downhill fast, culminating in a classless showdown that perfectly epitomized how far our Republic has fallen. Sebastian Gorka, a former Trump official and make-believe tough guy, aggressively accosted a reporter in the Rose Garden, calling him a “punk” as Trump’s allies chanted “Gorka” like a pack of wild animals. The entire thing was caught on video and is an utter disgrace to not only this administration but to this proud nation as well.

Natalie Dickinson

Natalie is a staff writer for the Washington Press. She graduated from Oberlin College in 2010 and has been freelance blogging and writing for progressive outlets ever since.

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