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By Margaret Hartmann, senior editor for Intelligencer who has worked at New York since 2012
Photo: Emily Elconin/Getty Images
Donald Trump was so embarrassed by coverage of his meltdown over the DNC on Truth Social and Fox News that he was still posting dubious excuses days later. But he definitely didn’t learn a thing from the experience. After special counsel Jack Smith filed a superseding indictment against Trump on Tuesday over his attempt to steal the 2020 election, the former president decided to “tweet through it” once again. And this time, he jazzed up his Truth Social meltdown with QAnon memes, calls for jailing his political foes, and vulgar claims about Kamala Harris.
To be sure, Trump’s Truth Social feed is never a bastion of measured political discourse. On a typical day, he might post an incoherent tirade or two about “Comrade Kamala,” repost a meme that depicts him as MAGA Jesus, and share some fawning Fox News videos. But since news about the new indictment broke on the evening of August 27, Trump has posted and reposted dozens of messages, and the concentration of unhinged vitriol is much higher than usual.
When asked if her boss was okay during a Thursday-morning CNN interview, Trump campaign spokesperson Karoline Leavitt dodged. “Look, I don’t think your viewers at home are concerned about social-media posts,” she said.
But if you’re curious about what kind of unhinged stuff a major presidential candidate has been dumping on social media, here’s a sample of the type of content Trump has been posting.
Rambling about political persecution
He initially responded to the new indictment with a nearly 500-word screed about Smith and “Kamala’s Weaponized System against her Political Opponent.” This was spread over four posts, but the first gives you the gist:
Even Trump seemed to realize this was more rambling than most people can handle. He concluded his opening volley with this tl;dr:
A crude sexual remark about Harris
Trump has said a lot of vaguely sexist things about his Democratic opponent, but he took things to a new level when he shared another Truth Social user’s post showing a photo of Harris with Hillary Clinton captioned, “Funny how blowj*bs impacted both their careers differently …” This is a reference to Bill Clinton’s affair with Monica Lewinsky, paired with a suggestion that Harris slept her way into a political career by dating former San Francisco mayor Willie Brown in the 1990s.
As the New York Times noted, this is the second time that Trump — who has “repeatedly been accused of sexual misconduct and was found liable last year for sexual abuse and defamation” — shared a sexually oriented attack against Harris:
Previously, on Aug. 18, Mr. Trump had shared a video from the Dilley Meme Team — a group of right-wing internet content creators that makespro-Trump videos and memesdenigrating his opponents — that parodied the Alanis Morissette song “Ironic” to attack Ms. Harris as “moronic.” In the parody song, the singer says Ms. Harris “spent her whole damn life down on her knees,” at which point a photo of Mr. Brown appears onscreen.
Calls to “lock up” his enemies
Trump has taken to pretending he never said “Lock her up” about Hillary Clinton (which is not true). But he definitely reposted multiple images showing his major political foes (and Bill Gates?) in orange jumpsuits, and calling for Jack Smith, the House January 6 Committee, and top Democrats like Barack Obama to be prosecuted, maybe via “public military tribunals.”
Lots of QAnon content
These memes may not make sense if you aren’t deep into conspiracy theories, but as ABC News explains, they all feature QAnon slogans:
Some of the other posts Trump shared included phrases circulated amongfollowers of QAnon, the pro-Trump conspiracy theory, including “Nothing can stop what is coming,” “Hold the line,” and “WWG1WGA”, which is an initialism for “Where we go one, we go all.”
Other weird stuff
You know, memes showing Trump hanging with a lion:
A post bragging that his “crowd size” is bigger than Harris’s on TikTok:
And a video of himself hawking a fourth collection of Trump trading cards, which come with cut-up bits of the suit he wore while debating Joe Biden “People are calling it the knockout suit,” Trump claims. (The video originally went up on Tuesday morning, but Trump reposted it mid-tirade):
You know, normal things a very stable genius would post. Nothing to see here!
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