This is part of how the hashtag spreads so fast. It doesn't have to mean anything, it just has to... resonate. Half the people tweeting about it have no idea what supposedly happened and the other half believe six contradictory sets of things at once. https://twitter.com/SlacktivistFred/status/1259690359099097088

What is happening in the White House and on Donald's Twitter today is... what happens when he realizes he's completely lost control of events. Or rather, when he realizes that controlling the narrative doesn't overwrite events. The virus is in his house.

Even though he's been able to use his corrupt cronies to head off actual consequences for his actions, Donald Trump has still been investigated, questioned, and confronted about them, which galls him to his core. It's not what he imagined the presidency being.

Even though he spent eight years being part of the hate machine against President Obama, the fact that President Obama had any respect at all, he saw as being *worship*. And he wanted that worship, expected it, when he seized the White House.

And there has never been a president in the history of the United States who received the kind of feverish, fawning, whimpering, simpering adulation and adoration he receives from his incredible shrinking base. But the best-loved president was still hated by many.

Donald Trump is still the least popular president for as long as we've been able to track that. And President Obama? He's got his detractors but he's among the most respected people to have held the office. Popular. Well-liked, well-remembered.

All of that... all of that is not new, not remotely news. But two confirmed (as in, they're admitting it) coronavirus cases among the personal staff of himself and the VP, and word that the virus spread further inside the West Wing?

That's new.

It's new, and it's happening at the same time that events all across the country are unfolding in a way he can't control or spin or reframe away. Mounting death toll, and believe me, he's got people telling him what the re-openings will do to those numbers.

So what's he do? What he always does. Doubles down. Throws blame. Changes the subject. Cries about being a victim while looking for someone to victimize.

And there's a whole lot of conspiracy theories, whole lot of memes, bot nets, psyops, propaganda machines just waiting.

What we're seeing in the Twitter trends tonight is the real right-wing "Death Star" coming online. He's building a critical mass of very amorphous and yet laser-focused aggrieved racism and decades of GOP partisan scandalmongering and pointing it in one direction.

Yes. Do you think this matters? It's not his pitch to the electorate. https://twitter.com/tredhawk3/status/1259694348167524356

He's not trying to win votes with it. He's trying to change the conversation with it. He's trying to do what he always does, on an escalating level, of pushing the Republican Party to a breaking point where they either go all in with him or try to stop him, knowing they won't.

So it's an appeal to "a tiny online right-wing sector of trolls". But the GOP goes along with it. Oh, suddenly to the people right outside that fringe, it seems more reasonable and important. And the media reports it the way they report everything. Normalized to more people.

The vast majority of people in the electorate don't have their mind changed one way or another about the relative merits of the two parties. They think, okay he's exaggerating but both sides exaggerate about the other.

Meanwhile, is he actually DOING the investigations? Actually having show trials? Actually using this as a pretext to purge more civil servants and implant more loyalists?

Are Democrats forced to waste time dealing with this?

If you think this doesn't matter because only a small number of people care about it, I want you to imagine what happens if he starts DOING these things, and only a small number of people care about it.

Imagine he's got people taking it deadly seriously while the Democrats and the media are still going around in circles about if he's literal-not-serious or serious-not-literal.

Imagine all the people in the Mild Moderate Middle who decided way back in 2016 that Mr. Trump can't be as bad as we said or Somebody Would've Done Something, watching as Someone Does Something about his enemies.

The fact that the vast majority of people in the country have no clue that "ObamaGate" is trending or what it means just means that if he does push on with a real "witch hunt" of an investigation and corrupt show trials, he'll have the benefit of surprise.

Be ready for it to get worse.

I will be writing more on this for my newsletter tomorrow.

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