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Trump’s Sad, Pitiful Post on Social Media Almost Makes The Internet Feel Bad For Him…Almost

I have one word for you, Mr. Trump: No.

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In the middle of the night on Thursday, Donald Trump tweeted possibly the saddest thing I’ve ever seen on Truth Social or any other social media site. Apparently apropos of nothing, Trump took to his little vanity site and posted, in all caps of course, “EVERYBODY WANTS TO BE MY FRIEND!!!”

If I didn’t know what context he was talking about, I would say he’s finally lost what little is left of his nearly-octogenarian mind.

CNN’s Kaitlan Collins added a little bit of that context over on X, Elon Musk’s social media platform:

That’s definitely some of it. Trump is very clearly a little triggered by how many people have been insinuating that Musk is really running the show, especially after his influence derailed the continuing resolution that would have prevented a government shutdown.

That maneuver made Trump look pretty foolish, since failure to pass it rests squarely on Republicans, who everyone knows are supposed to be sucking up to the incoming President. Republicans thought if they shut down the government while Biden was president still, they could blame it on the Democrats. But not enough members of the Freedom Caucus are as enamored of the debt ceiling as Trump needed to pass the replacement bill, and 38 of them voted against it.

So Trump has been trying to emphasize that it’s actually him, not Musk, who wields supreme executive power, and tweeting that everyone wants to be his friend was in one sense a manifestation of that.

But it’s also become somewhat of a theme for the president-elect.

Just the same way he often repeated talking points on the campaign trail, he likes to use the same catchphrases at individual events if he thinks they have sticking power. Here he is saying it at a press conference at Mar-a-Lago on the 16th:

But folks on social media took the message at face value. And many of them responded accordingly, telling Trump that nobody actually wants to be his friend.

The fact is, however, Trump is actually correct. As much as we saw people who initially opposed him in 2016 do an about face and support him later on, we’ve seen it even more this time around. Frankly, I think it’s because Republicans now think he must have some sort of spell on his supporters: How does a man, in the four years between his first presidency and his second, get convicted of 34 felonies, adjudicated liable for rape, and lose half a billion dollars in lawsuits against him — and still get elected?

This, in fact, seems more the case to me:

That’s the long and the short of it. Trump may be upset that people on social media are calling Elon “President Musk” and calling him “Vice President Trump,” but after allowing Musk to take the reins the way he has, he’s made it clear that both he and America itself are for sale.

It could be in retrospect that this message will turn out to have been a cry of existential dread. He’s a man who’s spent his entire life molding himself into the kind of guy that anyone would want to be friends with so they can have a tiny taste of his power and influence.

But after all this time, Donald Trump is finding out that power and influence are absolutely all he has to offer. Don Jr. wants to make him proud with a prettier, younger girlfriend, and she wants a spot in his administration. Elon Musk wanted to help him get elected because he agreed with his ideas — but it turns out he just wants the power of the presidency for himself.

Everywhere Trump turns, he’s going to see exactly what his value is.

Andrew Simpson
meet the author

Andrew is a dark blue speck in deep red Central Washington, writing with the conviction of 18 years at the keyboard and too much politics to even stand. When not furiously stabbing the keys on breaking news stories, he writes poetry, prose, essays, haiku, lectures, stories for grief therapy, wedding ceremonies, detailed instructions on making doughnuts from canned biscuit dough (more sugar than cinnamon — duh), and equations to determine the airspeed velocity of an unladen swallow. A girlfriend, a dog, two cats, and two birds round out the equation, and in his spare time, Drewbear likes to imagine what it must be like to have spare time.

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