The tweet that defined a decade of Trump
By David Mack, CNN
(CNN) — Ten years ago, Jesse Farrar produced what will probably be the most influential piece of writing of his life. It was a tweet, fired off casually late in the evening of October 1, 2016. He doesn’t even remember what prompted him to do it. “I was probably bored and wanted attention,” Farrar admitted.
Farrar’s post was a tiny script, of sorts, in which a character makes a pronouncement that is then interrupted by an action denoted by asterisks. It read:
It was a throwaway gag, but it was a throwaway gag with the earth-shaking power of prophecy. Much has been written about the Trump era and the norm-upending, scandal-surviving, attention-craving main character at its center. But few pieces of writing so deftly captured how the political and media cycles would play out over the next 10 years, again and again and again.
Consider this: Farrar posted his tweet six days before news of the “Access Hollywood” tape broke. Before the press began waiting to see when Trump’s pious running mate, Mike Pence, would abandon the sordid, disgraced candidate and his obviously doomed campaign. Before — Ah! Well. Nevertheless,
It was the tweet that became a meme that became a mantra, a skeleton key that still unlocks the past decade of American life.
“It’s indisputably one of the most important tweets in American politics about American politics, particularly from a leftist perspective,” said Jake Christie, who has been running a yearslong social media project called the “Museum of Twitter,” wherein he analyzes the site’s most influential posts, including an episode devoted to Farrar’s. “You just see it everywhere.”
That’s because, thanks to both President Donald Trump’s own skills and the institutions around him, the president has been able to wriggle out of a series of jams — investigations and impeachments, charges and convictions — that would have ended the careers of countless other politicians. He lost an election, responded with the most cataclysmic sore-loser performance in American history, then still found his way back to more power than ever before.
And like Farrar’s Twitter character, dangling on that final, hopeful comma, the president’s critics still return to speculating that this next scandal might just be the one that delivers comeuppance.
“Writing his political obituary is a fool’s errand — he endures persecution and eludes prosecution like no other public figure,” Kellyanne Conway, Trump’s 2016 campaign manager and White House senior adviser, wrote in the New York Times in 2023. “That cat has nine lives.”
For Farrar, now 38, unintentionally becoming the Nostradamus of a surreal and often very dumb political era has been a bizarre experience — haunting, even. Each time he’s confronted by his own words in others’ online jokes or in news stories, he’s reminded of who he was when he first wrote them and what the world used to feel like.
If anything, he wishes his little joke hadn’t proved so insightful. “I couldn’t have fathomed that we would have been doing it 10 years on, but we keep waiting for something to happen, and I just think it’s probably not going to,” Farrar said. “The world does keep on spinning like this, and that’s why I think it sucks so bad.”
Flashback to 2016
Despite his indelible contribution to political discourse, Farrar says he mostly experiences politics vicariously. Living with his wife and three kids in the exurbs of Nashville, he’s a leftist in a red state where he has never felt that any party truly represents him.
He’s now the co-host of the “Your Kickstarter Sucks” podcast and the “Go Off Kings” Twitch stream, but in 2016 Farrar was still figuring his life out, earning money as a freelancer by writing for places like Deadspin, The Daily Dot and Vice. Many of the outlets he worked with are now gone and Farrar’s work scrubbed from the internet.
Like many terminally online people, he recalls finding great humor in watching Trump, someone seemingly as addicted to Twitter as he himself was, campaigning for president. If the world of politics had always seemed like one big joke, here was a candidate who seemed to treat it as such.
At this point 10 years ago, Trump and his campaign had already survived 16 months of crises, from the day he launched his White House bid by calling Mexicans “rapists.” There were his disparagements against Sen. John McCain and other prisoners of war, his sexist comments against then-Fox News host Megyn Kelly, his mocking of a New York Times reporter with a disability, his calls for a Muslim ban, his initial resistance to denouncing a former Ku Klux Klan grand wizard, his attacks on a federal judge with Mexican heritage, his feud with a Muslim Gold Star family, and his saying that “Second Amendment people” might be able to “do” something to stop Hillary Clinton abolishing the right to bear arms or that Russian hackers should “find” Clinton’s emails.
Each of these scandals generated countless headlines from an aghast press and commentariat class. Trump wriggled out of all of them.
When Farrar wrote his fateful tweet, with the election just weeks away, Trump was caught up in yet another controversy, this one involving a woman named Alicia Machado. A former Miss Universe who had been namechecked by Hillary Clinton in the first debate, Machado said Trump had called her “Miss Piggy” and “Miss Housekeeping” when she had held the beauty pageant crown. He had denied Machado’s claims, but then proceeded to blast her in a series of middle-of-the-night tweets posted the day before Farrar’s.
Right around the time Farrar hit send, yet another scandal arrived: The New York Times published sections of Trump’s tax records, which Trump had refused to release. The documents showed he’d claimed a $916 million loss in 1995 that could have allowed him to avoid any federal income taxes for the next 18 years.
Looking back, Farrar doesn’t claim to have any extra political insights about that particular moment in history. He was simply marveling, like much of the country, that Trump seemed to be getting away with things that would previously have been politically unthinkable.
Some 10 months earlier, during a campaign stop in Iowa, Trump had remarked that his supporters were so loyal to him, “I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody, and I wouldn’t lose any voters.” That joke, which seemed to feel truer with each passing day, prompted Farrar to make his own.
Despite everything that that happened, he didn’t really believe Trump was going to win. “I thought it was a good goof,” he said. “I wish it had been, certainly.”
A decade of ‘ol Donny Trump’
Here is a non-exhaustive list of the outlets that have referenced Farrar’s tweet, sometimes even in headlines, in the years since he wrote it: The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Atlantic, The New Yorker, New York Magazine, Vox, Jezebel, Slate, HuffPost, The New Republic, BuzzFeed News, USA Today, Billboard and Esquire. Naturally, it also has its own entry on the internet anthology Know Your Meme.
McKay Coppins at The Atlantic called it “one of the all-time great tweets of this era,” while his colleague David A. Graham said it was of the “essential examples” of memes that make up the Trump era. “At some moment, the tweet transformed from a riposte to naive pundits into a shorthand for the strangeness of American politics,” Graham wrote earlier this summer.
“That particular tweet has had a lot of staying power,” said Dave Weigel, a political reporter at Semafor who’s previously referenced the “history” of Farrar’s tweet. “It was pretty perceptive because there’s so many liberals who just thought, ‘Well, surely he can’t get away with this,’ but that has atrophied over time.”
Weigel recalls covering the 2016 campaign for the Washington Post and never quite believing that the parade of scandals would ultimately be Trump’s downfall — especially once he won and had the power of the presidency behind him.
Fervor for Trump was so high among his supporters, and Weigel could sense a desire among some increasingly influential people to push back on what he calls “Watergate Brain”: the idea that a candidate, let alone a president, should be forced to face career-ending consequences for wrongdoing. (Vice President JD Vance would agree; in June 2026, he said if the Watergate scandal had occurred today, it would be a 12-hour news story. “The idea that it would have taken down a presidency is crazy,” Vance said.)
“I think there’s just been an understanding that scandals are not what they used to be,” Weigel said. “Trump survived. Is that unique to him?”
I wriggle by with the help of my friends
Analysts have spent much of the last decade trying to define what has made Trump such a unique, seemingly Teflon-clad political creature. For one, he studied under the tutelage of Roy Cohn, where the philosophy, as summed up by acolyte Roger Stone, was always “admit nothing, deny everything, launch counterattack.” And, especially in his second term as president, he’s clearly adopted the “flood the zone with sh*t” strategy of his early adviser Steve Bannon, correctly assuming the media and general public would struggle to keep up with an avalanche of controversy.
But to assume Trump possesses some sort of “special political magic” may itself be a faulty premise, according to Julia Azari, a political scientist at Wisconsin’s Marquette University who has traced the evolution (or devolution) of American political norms.
“He doesn’t lose popularity because of these scandals, but he’s never all that popular either,” said Azari, pointing to polling in which Trump has never really enjoyed a plurality of widespread public support. “I think that we lose a lot of analytical leverage when we write him off as being magical.”
Similarly, New York Times columnist Jamelle Bouie told Christie in his “Museum of Twitter” series that Farrar’s tweet was “defeatist” because it played into the idea of Trump being the only person with any agency — the “main character of the world” — that everyone else is stuck reacting to.
Instead, Bouie believes it’s the people and institutions around Trump — from Republicans to Democrats, Congress to the courts — that have made the last decade possible.
“Other people don’t bother to deal with the fact that you could probably get him to go away for good. They kind of allow him to wriggle his way back in,” Bouie said. “He’s really figured out that persistence is 99% of success. All you have to do is show up and not go away, and people will be like, ‘I guess this guy is supposed to be here.’” (White House staff did not respond to a request for comment for this story.)
One skill Trump has shown, though, is a talent for reframing his scandals to convince his supporters that outrage about his behavior is part of broader liberal hostility toward them, according to Whitney Phillips at the University of Oregon who has written books about polarization and “anti-liberal demonology.” Farrar’s tweet, Phillips said, plays off the dynamic of liberals getting up in arms, and people then making fun of liberals for getting up in arms.
Some of this liberal zeal, which Farrar was mocking from a leftist perspective, has been stoked by online actors or cable news talking heads who constantly tease new developments in ongoing Trump-in-trouble narratives to build hope and their own audience numbers. (Remember those Robert Mueller prayer candles?)
But some of it is also an inevitable byproduct of the media doing their job by investigating potential wrongdoing. “Even if all of the coverage from the very beginning had absolutely been 100% straight news reporting with no editorializing and no giddiness, then it still would have been sucked into this narrative of Trump’s, where any opposition makes you partisan,” Phillips said. “That’s just this amazing trick that he has mastered.”
From ‘Donny Trump’ to disillusionment
For Farrar, seeing his own words used to this day in stories that tease whether the end may finally be nigh can be uniquely exhausting. When Graham, The Atlantic writer, used Farrar’s tweet in a July story about the Iran war being the “trap” that has finally dealt a blow to Trump’s sheen of invincibility, Farrar was unmoved. “Where’s the trap? Is he caught yet? Is it over? Nothing happened,” Farrar said.
Even as Republicans distance themselves from an increasingly unpopular Trump ahead of the midterms, and even as Democrats prepare themselves for the potential for sweeping victories that could deliver them power in Congress, Farrar remains gloomy. He has no faith that they or anyone else will suddenly hold the president to account, nor that the president will cease doing whatever he pleases.
Farrar acknowledged Bouie’s criticism that his attitude was defeatist; he is defeatist. And cynical. And jaded. Being the unintentional voice of political pessimism can make a person something of a pessimist.
Over 10 years, he’s been taught to be skeptical that consequences or karma still exist for some. The system, as he sees it, is rigged towards elite impunity, and nothing in the last decade has proved him wrong yet.
“I think if you keep betting on ‘Nothing happens,’ you’re only wrong once, and then it’s like, ‘Well, great. I’m glad I was wrong,” Farrar said. “But until then, I’ve racked up a million victories on ‘Bad things don’t happen to powerful people.’ That’s how the world is organized, you know.”
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