By Alice Hubbard Lahoda, political columnist
Welcome to #TrumpTweetWatch2k17, the unironic-but-oh-man-I-wish-we-had-the-luxury-of-irony-right-now hashtag I’m using to ring in the new year and the new presidency.
But first, here’s a quick recap of relevant events in order to understand what’s about to happen on Jan. 20:
- 1. In 1905, a dude named Fred Trump was born. He built his own real estate empire in America.
2. Fred Trump had some kids, including a guy named Donald. Donald took over Fred’s real estate empire and consistently bankrupted his businesses and/or broke housing regulations in the process. Donald has had a total of three wives (Ivana, Marla and Melania) and five children (Ivanka, Don Jr., the blonde one with a creepy smile, the daughter that isn’t Ivanka and Baron). Somewhere along the way, he “wrote” a really successful book called The Art of the Deal, and “Donald Trump” became a household name. Then he got a show on NBC on which he sort of fired celebrities who were never really employed by him in the first place.
3. In March 2009, Trump joined Twitter. (I know it sounds crazy now, but this fact will be important later, I promise.)
4. In 2011, President Barack Obama eviscerated Trump at the White House Correspondents Dinner.
5. In 2015, Trump and his family rode down an escalator in Trump Tower—in a scene straight out of a sitcom plot that was rejected for being too absurd—and said some racist things to a crowd of people he paid to be there.
6. This Friday, Jan. 20, 2017 at noon, Trump will be sworn in as the 45th president of the United States.
So, how did we get here? Well, I might be missing a few details in my six-point recap, but the most important detail is easily #3. We didn’t know it back in March 2009, but the most important Twitter account ever to exist was created that month.
Twitter is how Trump found a captive audience that followed him even after Trump stopped hosting “The Apprentice.” Twitter is the tool that gave him the ability to speak—unfiltered—to well over 10 million loyal followers throughout the 2016 election cycle; and, most importantly, Twitter is now the bane of most Americans’ existence.
If you’re at all like me (and I hope for your sake that you aren’t), almost every morning, you wake up to anywhere from one to 10 notifications alerting you to the fact that Trump has taken to the Twitterverse overnight again, usually to condemn Saturday Night Live for having the audacity to mock him with astonishing accuracy or to criticize a revered civil rights leader for being “all talk” and “no action.” Occasionally, he retweets followers who praise him (sometimes said followers are literal high school students). Often, his tweets include grammatical and spelling errors; without fail, the @realDonaldTrump Twitter account gives me anxiety before breakfast and an ulcer before lunch.
But there’s no need for all of us to suffer from Twitter-inspired health problems. Hence, the birth of #TrumpTweetWatch2k17, the weekly column that you can trust to break down all of soon-to-be President Trump’s most outrageous tweets: The good, the bad and the “extremely unattractive (both inside and out).”
We’re still a few days away from a Trump presidency and the many “unpresidented” tweets he’ll surely send our way. So in the meantime, instead of analyzing the tweets he sent out as president-elect, I’ve asked some members of the Northeastern community to predict what Trump’s first official tweets as president will be. I’ll be honest, I think they all have a 90 percent—or higher—chance of coming true:
Prediction #1: “Former LOSER Apprentice contestant suing me because I fired her! Sad!”
-Ethan Penner, senior chemical engineering major
Prediction #2: “Mr. Obama was very smart to attend my inauguration! Entertainment was best in D.C. Now we make America great again. Historic day!”
-Andrew Curran, senior political science major
Prediction #3: “Women think they can distract from my inauguration and democracy? WRONG! Same people who did phony polls counting these women’s buses. Sad…”
-Alissa Zimmer, junior political science and environmental studies major
Prediction #4: “Loser John Roberts kept interrupting me during oath, his fault I didn’t remember words. Sad!”
-Robert Cohen, class of 2015, bachelor of science in political science
Send us a screenshot of your own Trump tweet predictions at @HuntNewsNU with the hashtag #TrumpTweetWatch2k17. (It’s harder than it looks! As Curran of Prediction #2 put it, “It’s like a cubist painting; you have to mess everything up just the right way.”)
I hope you all have a blissfully unplugged weekend. I know I won’t.
Photo courtesy Uncalno Tekno, Creative Commons
