Donald Trump, a YouTube comment section who became a real boy and was recently elected President of the United States, is an avid Twitter user. Trump, who is dumb, likes to share his various dumb thoughts with the world via often ill-advised and dumb tweets. His staff, many of who are also dumb, are at least smart enough to know that Trump’s dumb tweets are often counterproductive and make the job of enabling the Republican Party to rob their own supporters blind all that much more difficult. Trump’s dumb tweets have become such a problem that it was recently rumored that a team of outside attorneys would vet Trump’s dumb tweets before he actually tweeted them.
But out of all of the countless dumb tweets to spew forth from Trump’s tiny, dumb fingers, there are two that now seem dumber and far more consequential than all the rest.
The first dumb tweet, sent early on the morning of March 4th, alleged that former President Barack Obama had Trump’s “wires tapped” at Trump Tower.
This tweet, which was dumb, unfounded, and displayed a serious dearth of understanding of how any of this shit actually works, was followed by even more dumb tweets that compared this thing, a thing that did not happen, to Watergate.
It is dumb for a sitting president to accuse, with no evidence whatsoever, his predecessor of such things. Because of these dumb tweets, much of the White House staff was mobilized to find some shred of evidence to back up this nonsense claim. While Trump’s staff was scrambling to give this dumb tweet at least a veneer of truthiness, White House spokesman Sean Spicer was insisting that this thing that did not happen actually totally happened and it was damn serious. “There is no question something happened. The question is, is it surveillance, is it a wiretap, or whatever,” he said, right before informing the press that the White House would no longer answer questions about the president’s dumb tweet.
When Trump’s staff felt like they finally had something that might make Trump’s dumb tweet look not so dumb, they enlisted House Intelligence Committee Chair Devin Nunes in what would unfold as one of the dumbest series of events in recent memory. Basically, the White House gave Nunes access to some classified info that could possibly, they hoped, would make Trump’s dumb tweet seem, if you kinda squint, less dumb. Instead of passing this info on to the rest of his committee, Nunes raced back to the White House the next day to inform them of this classified info bombshell...that the White House itself fed him the previous day.
It was all very dumb and made Nunes look like such a compromised clown that Nunes was eventually forced to “recuse” (there are some doubts as to just how “recused” Nunes actually considers himself to be) himself from his committee’s investigation into potential Russian meddling in the 2016 election. Trump’s dumb tweet had cost him a dedicated Team Trump player in a prime position to steer his committee’s investigation and protect, as much as possible, Team Trump, all while reminding anyone paying attention that the American intelligence community was alarmed enough about potential shady contacts between the Trump campaign and Russia that they had been paying attention for quite some time.
But today we learned that Trump’s very dumb tweet on March 4th absolutely pales in comparison to a tweet so profoundly dumb that it could quite possibly alter history. Out of the blue on May 9th and using a completely bullshit cover story, President Trump fired FBI chief James Comey. Trump, being dumb, couldn’t keep his story straight for even a couple of days about why he fired Comey and soon felt bold (and dumb) enough to taunt him with what could possibly go down as the dumbest tweet of all time.
They say politicians shouldn’t pick fights with those who purchase ink by the barrel. This is true. They should also not fuck with a lifelong law enforcement bureaucrat who keeps his damn receipts, especially after you’ve fired him and lied about why you did so. Trump’s dumb taunting tweet was exactly what Comey needed to take the investigation of the Trump campaign’s potential ties to Russia to a whole new level. Comey, who insisted on documenting all of his interactions with Trump because he believed, not without some justification, that Trump would simply lie about what had transpired between them, testified this morning that he decided to ask a friend to leak one of his meticulous memos to the press because he hoped those tapes from Trump’s dumb tweet would corroborate his version of events and show everyone that there really needed to be a special counsel named to investigate this whole mess.
“I asked a friend of mine to share the content of the memo with a reporter. I didn’t do it myself for a variety of reasons but I asked him to because I thought that might prompt the appointment of a special counsel.”
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Comey was moved to act after the president tweeted a cryptic threat that he, Comey, “better hope that there are no ‘tapes’ of our conversations before he starts leaking to the press!”
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At that point, Comey had kept silent on the Oval Office meeting — largely because senior FBI leadership agreed that there was no way to corroborate his account, he said.
According to Comey, a few days after the tweet, he woke up “in the middle of the night” with the realization that there might be a tape of his conversation with the president.
“I needed to get that out into the public square,” he said.
So Trump, a dumb person, fires the FBI director after months of dropping some not terribly subtle hints that he wants Comey to chill on that whole “Russia thing,” and lies, for a day or so, at least, about why he did it. Because he is so dumb, he feels like maybe he’s made that problem go away. (and says as much to two high-ranking Russian officials the very next day) Then, again, because he is so dumb, he tweets a threat to the man he just fired, a threat that gives Comey the opening he needs to show his damn receipts and burn Trump’s bullshit to the ground while also forcing the Department of Justice’s hand to appoint another former FBI Director, Robert Mueller, as an independent special counsel to investigate the whole damn thing. And there’s just not much that Trump’s BFF, racist elf and Attorney General of the United States, Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III, can do about it anymore.
Trump’s dumb tweets cost him a key ally in charge of the House committee investigating him, made much of his staff look like total fucking clowns while they tried to make his dumb tweet about “wire-tapps” into something almost kosher, and then spurred the man he fired hoping to make all of this go away to burn him so hard that a special counsel was appointed to take over the investigation.
That’s damn impressive, even by Trump standards.
Never tweet.