You know that thing where you're in a group text with a bunch of frenemies and they're constantly calling you on your B.S. and you suspect that most of them are secretly in another group text where they talk trash about you so you decide to start your own group text with only the people who put up with your nonsense? Well, that happened at the White House yesterday in an event they had the audacity to call a Presidential Social Media Summit.
The White House held the gathering of trolls, pariahs, attention-seekers, and sentient bots seemingly for the sole purpose of giving the president yet another opportunity to complain that he is not more popular online. "People come up to me and they say, 'Sir, I can't get you. I can't follow you,'" he said, claiming that he was being blocked from his acolytes on social media. One would think that a meeting with this agenda would include an intervention of sorts and then perhaps workshops titled "Have you tried not being a monster?", "That's not how any of this works", and "How to search for and post pictures of animals in costumes." Instead, it was a greatest hits of Trump's most frequent unfounded complaints about social media censorship and then a circus procession of Ronald McDonalds and Pagliaccis, including Diamond and Silk, Sebastian Gorka, and The Other Trump Son.
While on the surface the event seemed explicitly designed to get on my nerves, the true objective of the buffoonery ball was quickly revealed: they gathered together in Michelle Obama's White House to finally kill irony once and for all.
Behold, a bust of lanky zaddy Abraham Lincoln and, beside him, a large blown up printout of a Trump tweet in which he pretended that his "covfefe" typo was some sort of niche joke like he's a staff writer on Documentary Now!
Some staffer really was tasked with taking a screenshot of a tweet that is, objectively, dumb, sending that screenshot to the White House print office, specifying that this screenshot needed to be enlarged to poster size and mounted on card stock like it's a presentation at a high school science fair. They did this in the White House. This was someone's job. They had to requisition an easel.
For months, The Daily Show has been curating the pop-up Trump Presidential Library, which features enlarged and mounted Trump tweets in an obvious and clever satire of his behavior and the gravity of the office he improbably holds. But this new, straight-faced action (they used a special printer) created what we in the comedic sciences call a "satirical vortex" which will soon form an "ironic black hole" which will soon consume all attempts at humor in the universe.
When reached for comment, The Daily Show released the following statement:
The assault on reality, humor, and context didn't stop there. Later, in the Rose Garden, former Trump advisor Sebastian Gorka got into a shouting match with a writer from Playboy.
Journalist Brian Karem shouted at Gorka about blocking him on Twitter, drawing a contrast to the stated complaints of the "summit." Gorka responded by loudly accusing Karem of "threatening me in the Rose Garden" and then demonstrated how much danger he was in by standing up from his seat, walking around three rows of folding chairs, removing his glasses, and approaching Karem like he was an actor in a terribly blocked production of Inherit the Wind.
The crowd, which included that woman who always shows up places in MAGA flag dresses (you either know her or you don't; doesn't matter), began chanting Gorka's name over and over again. Okay, real talk, I was fairly certain that Sebastian Gorka was the name of a minor Roald Dahl character so this is all a stunning development for me.
Gorka then told another reporter that he blocks 16,000 people on Twitter "because they're asshats." I would say that an event meant to be a gloating celebration of how bad these people are at social media and how unfair it is that the secret government run by Mark Zuckerberg is shadow-banning them ending with a former adviser bellowing about how many people he blocks on Twitter is ironic. I would say that that's ironic, but as we all know irony is now unfortunately deceased. RIP irony: run over by a clown car last seen speeding away from the White House gates.
