U.S. President Donald Trump retweeted a random fistfight over the weekend in an attempt to make fun of people who wear masks during the pandemic, the latest sign that Trump is basically a bored troll who just so happens to have the sole authority to launch America’s many nuclear weapons. Trump, as everyone knows at this point, is a fundamentally bad person who’s currently overseeing the deaths of over 1,000 Americans per day during the coronavirus pandemic.
“It’s a good thing they’re wearing masks,” Barrett Wilson, a writer for Quillette and the Federalist, wrote in his own tweet of the fistfight, which purportedly took place at the Hard Rock Hotel in Miami.
Trump retweeted Wilson, who was himself retweeting something from Ian Miles Cheong, a Twitter personality who previously wrote for the far-right websites Dangerous and the Daily Caller. It’s unclear what the fight, which has racked up 2.9 million views, may have been about.
It’s a good thing they’re wearing masks https://t.co/lZI2rB6t9o
— Barrett Wilson (@BarrettWilson6) July 26, 2020
Cheong captioned the video “Meanwhile at the Hard Rock in Miami,” and didn’t provide any other context for why he was sharing the footage. Depressingly, there’s even another layer to this ouroboros of dogshit. A Twitter user going by Cdai appears to have originally tweeted the video with the caption, “They fighting in hardrock” followed by several crying emojis.
Trump has overseen the infection of at least 4.2 million Americans with coronavirus and the death of over 146,000 — the worst coronavirus pandemic in the world. Trump reluctantly encouraged people to wear masks last week, something that he really shouldn’t be given credit for after so much death and misery on his watch.
Trump’s Twitter use has always been weird and we’re all basically numb to it at this point. CNN anchor Jake Tapper even pointed out that he was attacked on Twitter over the weekend by the president and he didn’t hear about it until hours later.
“Honestly the second worst thing about the president attacking me on twitter — after the sad statement made about his focus and how wrong he is about the pandemic — is that I didn’t even know it happened until 3 hours later. No one called, no one emailed. It’s just noise,” Tapper tweeted late Sunday.
During normal times, having the president condemn you on social media would be a huge news story that your friends or coworkers would likely alert you to. Today, it’s just par for the course as Trump obliterates what were once considered norms of decorum for the top office in the country. As you may recall, President Obama previously got heat in conservative media for wearing a tan suit.
It’s easy to see this getting even more bizarre as we get closer to the 2020 presidential election in November, but it’s not just Trump’s Twitter account that we should be afraid of going off the rails. Trump has made it explicitly clear that he already thinks there’s going to be election fraud, setting up the stage for him to contest the election. And if that happens, there’s a very real possibility Trump might refuse to leave. This isn’t just idle speculation either. Experts from think tanks and various former government officials have actually gamed out what might happen in November if the election is close.
“All of our scenarios ended in both street-level violence and political impasse,” Rosa Brooks, a law professor at Georgetown told the Boston Globe. “The law is essentially […] it’s almost helpless against a president who’s willing to ignore it.”
And with Trump’s large audience on social media, he has the ability to stoke fear and doubt with a few taps of his finger. Today, it’s fistfights about God-knows-what. Tomorrow, it’s gun-toting arseholes who love their neo-fascist president.