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I hear again and again that people shouldn’t ‘amplify’ Trump now that he’s lost power and his platforms on social media. This is a theory and understanding of politics and speech that I have always thought was more or less bankrupt. It crops up again now when Trump releases one of his Twitter-esque statements “from the office of” the 45th President, which he distributes to reporters. This happened again yesterday when he released a lengthy – quite lengthy – tirade against Drs Fauci and Birx. The idea is that journalists posting these on Twitter or discussing them somehow does Trump’s work for him rather than keeping him bottled in what really must be a personal hell of exile from the social media platforms which were so central to his political rise and the supply of endorphins in his bloodstream. But really these blasts only underscore how distant he has become from the centers of power, both literal and figurative. He used to yell in our faces or live in our heads. Now he’s reduced to nailing his rants to a public bulletin board way on the outskirts of town.
It’s like he’s barking into a pipe deep in a mine shaft and you can only faintly hear him out of the exposed pipe end sticking up out from the ground.