Donald Trump has been stunned into silence

| 11:16 pm EDT October 22, 2019
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So that’s what it takes to shut him up. This morning Donald Trump tried to distract us from Bill Taylor’s impeachment testimony by making an incredibly racist remark about being the victim of a lynching. This afternoon Trump tried again to distract us by leaking that he might replace Mick Mulvaney with Kellyanne Conway. But by the time the details of Taylor’s testimony began to publicly surface, Trump had gone silent.

Aside from some generic retweets and a “good news seems to be happening” tweet about Syria, all of which were almost surely posted by his staff, Donald Trump hasn’t tweeted anything in about thirteen hours. He hasn’t said a word about Bill Taylor or his testimony. He hasn’t attacked Taylor’s character. He hasn’t accused Taylor of participating in some wild conspiracy with Hillary Clinton and AOC, or similar such nonsense. Trump hasn’t said anything.

This is remarkable, because Trump loves punching down at people like Bill Taylor, who don’t have a long-established reputation with the general public, and are thus (in theory) more easily smeared. It’s not just that Trump isn’t bothering to fight back against Taylor. It’s that Trump has apparently given up on even trying to distract the public from what Taylor had to say. Trump isn’t even bothering to tweet about his favorite Fox News hosts tonight. He’s just gone silent.

Maybe Donald Trump has resigned himself to the fact that racist tweets, or gossip about his own personnel moves, isn’t going to be enough to distract anyone from the bombshell that Bill Taylor dropped on him today. Or maybe Trump is just too stunned by the totality of what’s transpired, and he’s hiding under his desk. Trump’s handlers aren’t even doing any real ghost-tweeting for him tonight. Something is up here.