Donald Trump is back at the erratic and disturbing Twitter behavior, retweeting a GIF from an anti-Semitic Twitter account (CNN Sucks/@fuctupmind) which imagines him hitting Hillary Clinton in the back of the head with a golf ball and causing her to trip.
Donald Trump’s amazing golf swing #CrookedHillary pic.twitter.com/vKhxxFCBV1
— CNN SUCKS (@Fuctupmind) September 14, 2017
Just as his retweets often work to promote racist lies, or incite violence against the media under the guise of “humor,” today’s retweet feeds into into a foul, sexist undercurrent in American society. On a basic level, it plays into Trump’s delusions of himself as a great athlete and a master of comeuppances against the “elites.” But on a more insidious level, it laughs at the idea of hurting Hillary Clinton, in an atmosphere where someone has already been put in jail for offering a reward for assaulting her. The whole point of the video is Tee-hee, I hit a woman who dared to challenge me! Har har, bitch deserved it! That joke isn’t funny, in any circumstance – and it certainly isn’t clever or normal coming from a sitting president talking about his political opponent in a public forum. Instead, like so much of what Trump pushes to Twitter, it’s as disturbing as it is juvenile.
In addition, the original GIF comes from an account (@fuctupmind) that’s pushed anti-Semitic content. We already know that Trump’s Twitter feed is filled with Drudge Report headlines and Fox and Friends clips, often dragging up fringe stories and far-right talking points. It’s therefore unsurprising that the account which originally tweeted the Hillary Clinton GIF has posted some disturbing content. As The Daily Beast reports, “in November of last year, the @fuctupmind account posted an anti-Semitic message which read in part: ‘Please get rid of the Hasidic Jews.’ That tweet was deleted later Sunday.”
I know that everyone knows this already, but…this is not normal. And I don’t want to spend too much time covering Twitter shenanigans when Senate Republicans are gearing up to rip insurance away from millions of Americans, but…it’s not normal. And so I have to keep covering it like the norms violation that it is.
(Via Jezebel and The Daily Beast; image via Shutterstock)
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