Trump Will Return to Twitter Soon

I’ve figured it out. I’ve cracked the code. After making the worst deal of his life, the former president has made one of his best. Trump gets his microphone, Elon gets Trump, and Taibbi gets a gold-plated Musk gift basket for his kitchen table. If he wants one, that is. It’s possible he’s doing this for the love of the game. Doesn’t really matter.

Grab your tinfoil hat, corkboard, and red string. We’re going on an adventure.

All I want is a world where our future does not depend on people with names like Nick Fuentes, Ye, Elon Musk, and Donald Trump.

The last time I thought about Nick Fuentes was March 2022, when I watched his former best friend and employee Jaden McNeil go on a rival alt-right videocast and spill more tea than Boston circa 1773. Five incredible hours of disclosure that flew by like minutes: the Stalin emulation, the Euphoria obsession, the inspection of McNeil’s room for cumstains with a black light. The attempt to run McNeil out of the movement for kissing a girl. Psychosexual controlling cult-like grifting behavior by the saddest, most closeted little man on the planet and I could not stop laughing while I shoveled popcorn into my face with both hands.

But that’s entertainment, that’s me being a sick little weirdo with an alt-right fascination. In any sane world that’s the end of Fuentes, right? Right?

Kanye Fucking West. Brilliant musician, yes. Severely mentally ill, fascist fashionisto. Incredibly sad what’s happening there, absolutely wretched: why am I, a politics nerd, obsessing over what Ye does next, and what it means for the world we live in?

ELON GODDAMN MUSK. The space boy, the car-on-fire boy: really cannot emphasize enough that I do not write about science or space or cars that fall apart, but here I am writing about Musk for the third time in 30 days. Love him or hate him, there’s no good reason why Elon Musk should be the Discourse Decider and yet here we are anyway.

Donald Trump — look, whatever, I don’t need to belabor that point. At least Trump ran for office and won it once, at least he applied for the damn job. 2022 is when you’ve got a group of four people having an outsized impact on America’s future and Trump has the most-earned spot at the table. Please kill me.

Whatever. I’ve written half of this article at least six times, then started over because current events made whatever I was writing obsolete. After Trump bafflingly dined with identitarian ethnonationalist race realist actual goddamn Nazi Nick Fuentes and his increasingly unhinged friend Ye, I started work on an obituary for Donald Trump’s career. Then, in the middle of my draft, Ye strapped on a $160 Balenciaga gimp mask and proclaimed his love for Hitler repeteadly on Alex Jones. Suddenly Fuentes isn’t the most notable extreme antisemite at Mar-a-Lago on November 22nd. Everyone gets a Ye mulligan now; too many people loved Graduation; maybe Trump survives this after all. Started a reverse obituary, slept on it, then woke up less sure. Pivoted to an exploration of what it means when Ye, someone who has unlimited amouts of every reward capitalism promises, is this unhappy and this insane.

Then Taibbi’s Twittergate hit and I was so tired I just gave up and spent the next two days playing The Long Dark cranked to max difficulty so I could die by wolves and/or hypothermia every 20 minutes. During one of my runs my phone alerted me to Trump’s call for the suspension of the Constitution and I ran directly at a grizzly bear so it could maul me to death.

The smouldering toxic burn pit of the last two paragraphs isn’t Hollywood gossip. It is an assortment of last week’s biggest political headlines. Are there any grizzly bears in Brooklyn?

I finally read Taibbi’s thread. I don’t know what you want me to say. I’ve written about the Hunter Biden laptop story suppression before: I think it was very bad and a huge mistake. Looks like Twitter’s moderation team panicked. Part of that panic was likely a genuine reaction against something that looked like disinformation, but the decision was doubtless partisan. I hate it. Genuinely.

Nothing about the carefully curated excerpts of these emails we got to see suggests government involvement at all. Also, we know that Matt Taibbi had to agree to “certain conditions” to gain access. These conditions could have been as simple as releasing the story on Twitter first, but they could have been more and we’ll never really know. I want the unredacted emails. I want full disclosure. I want context.

Forget it. It doesn’t matter. If we lived in a better world, these emails would kick-start a conversation about content moderation in the modern age, but we live in this one instead and the story did what it was always supposed to do: explode like an atomic bomb on the front page of every conservative and far-right news outlet days after Trump’s dinner guest quadroupled down on his antisemitism for hours on Alex Jones. Pundits have transformed a story of content moderation gone wrong into yet another top-down conspiracy to steal the 2020 election from Donald Trump. What are the bipolar rantings of some rapper compared to a scandal like that?

But Twittergate is more than just a simple distraction from Trump’s troubles. It’s an “under new management” banner on the restaurant that gave you food poisoning six months ago. Without that kind of clean break from the past, a Trump return to Twitter would carry at least a whiff of desperation. “Thank you Daddy Musk for saying I’m not grounded anymore.”

Trump needs Twitter. But Musk needs Trump more. Trump made Twitter the most relevant social media platform with no close seconds. It won’t be quite the same with Trump as a candidate and not the president, but it’s still Musk’s best bet at relevancy and adoration as the platform continues to glitch out and hemorrhage advertisers. Maybe he can get some of that parallel economy money, those far-right grift dollars. Plus, it’s hugely humiliating to offer someone a seat at the table only to have them tell you they’d prefer to eat at a clearly inferior restaurant, especially for a narcissist who needs everyone to love him, all of the time.

So Musk will repaint the interior and fire the kitchen staff, reprint the menus and roll out the red carpet. Bow and scrape to Emperor Trump as he deigns to patronize the establishment again. It works because Musk is terminally beta and because Trump has never forgotten the most important maxim of our modern age: if you’re good at something, never do it for free.

Look, I could be wrong. Maybe this is a unilateral Musk move, maybe Trump is too broken and too tired to take him up on it. Maybe I’ve just been driven completely insane by a week of bad-trip news headlines that have me longing for the comparative sobriety of two tabs of acid and a tank of nitrous oxide. I’m fumbling for meaning in a world that’s spinning into chaos. The fact that my theory makes sense is probably the best argument for it being false.

If I’m wrong, though — if Trump doesn’t come back to Twitter after this — I’m writing that obituary.