Donald Trump’s deafening silence
Yesterday evening a pair of tweets, similar in message but clearly written by two different people, appeared on Donald Trump’s official Twitter account within two minutes of each other. In the twenty-four hours since, Trump has gone silent on Twitter altogether. Yes, we know he’s traveling to Singapore and he’s supposed to be preparing for his fake summit with Kim Jong Un. But that’s never stopped him from tweeting inappropriately before – so what’s suddenly happening now?
Because Trump has now gone a full twenty-four hours without tweeting, we can rule out the notion that this has anything to do with time zones. Whatever his local time has been, and whichever hours he ended up sleeping, the window of time for his traditional “morning” rant has long since come and gone. This may have something to do with how poorly his last Twitter rant went.
Last night Trump got caught with his pants down (not literally, though that may come next) when he agreed to the official G7 communique – apparently without reading it – and then later realized that it contained language condemning his puppet masters in Russia. As a result we saw a pair of tweets on Trump’s account, both attacking Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau. We know that at least one of them was written and posted by Trump’s handlers without his knowledge. That means it’s possible that the two tweets were written by two different staffers, and that Trump had nothing to do with it.
In any case, Donald Trump’s attack on Justin Trudeau has been received extraordinarily poorly. Everyone from French President Emmanuel Macron to Senator John McCain has hit Trump back for it. Has he gone silent because he realized he picked the wrong fight? Or is this about Trump’s collapsing health and increasing inability to function? After all, he isn’t even bothering to tweet about how well he expects his North Korea summit to go. Trump’s silence doesn’t always mean something. But considering the current circumstances, something is off here.
