“I WON THIS ELECTION, BY A LOT! (sic)” tweeted Donald Trump on November 7. No one can blame the Twitter handle @realDonaldTrump of maintaining presidential gravitas the last four years. But ever since the vote counting for the United States presidential polls got underway, it has shivered away into one neurotic chatter. For someone who foregrounded an all-cap-victory, the Republican continued to protest too much. November 8. “Bad things happened which our observers were not allowed to see.” November 9. He shifts to blaming the media for calling out the elections in Joe Biden’s favour. November 10 tweets constitute updates from Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Georgia, Nevada, with a fair bit of name-calling. Then suddenly, there is talk of vaccines.
Ouch!
It turns out that a vaccine for Covid-19 is peg to hang more accusations from. Potus blames vaccine makers for lacking the “courage” to announce vaccines before the elections. He warns citizens of the United States of Twitter, “If Joe Biden were President, you wouldn’t have the vaccine for another four years…” And to think some people in India were cringing at the BJP’s very conditional promise of free vaccines in Bihar post an NDA win. In any case, Trump’s all-caps tweets keep coming at intervals. Sample this one: “WE ARE MAKING BIG PROGRESS… MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN! WE WILL WIN!” November 11 to 14. Continuing talk of rigged elections. He says, “This election was rigged, from Dominion all the way up and down!” And on November 15, he first concedes --- albeit tangentially --- that Biden has won. He tweets, “He won because the election was rigged.”
Goo Goo Gaga
November 16. He is still eddying in contradictions. He is crying himself hoarse saying the elections were “most fraudulent” and “dead people voted”. He is also saying in a loop “We will win”. One tweet that is sure to have got Hillary Clinton’s goat is this: “…The only thing secure about our 2020 Election was that it was virtually impenetrable by foreign powers.” By this time, what with the bawling and blabber --- “Vaccines are coming fast” and “Joe Biden was a total disaster in handling the H1N1 Swine Flu…” --- one can no longer tell if this is the handle of the 45th President of United States or an infant scorned. Out of somewhere, the hashtag DiaperDon starts to trend and almost every other tweet now comes pinned with a Twitter disclaimer about veracity, etc. But Earth hath no fury like a presidential crybaby and when his favourite rattle cannot produce the desired effect, he will junk it, of course. After a couple of messages about Twitter sending out “totally false trends”, @realDonaldTrump tweets on Thanksgiving Day, “For purposes of National Security, Section 230 must be immediately terminated!!!” Suffice to say, Section 230 protects social media companies from liability for content posted by users.
Now, now, babies will be babies.
