Twitter Is Real Life

There are two ways to understand the first month of Donald Trump’s presidency.

One is through the lens of history, as a carefully constructed program drawn from the authoritarian playbook that was perfected decades ago overseas. Scholars like Timothy Snyder, Ruth Ben-Ghiat, and Anne Applebaum could explain in gory detail, I’m sure, how actions A, B, and C taken by the Trump administration correspond to actions 1, 2, and 3 of the average crackpot Euro-fascist regime and why we should all be on the lookout for D, E, and F next.

There’s something to that, no doubt. It’s not like Trump 2.0 is without blueprints for its ambitions. Overwhelming and demoralizing the opposition have plainly been conscious objectives of the past 30 days.

But I get fidgety when critics insist on interpreting Trump’s behavior in terms of deliberate strategy. He’s not a historian, lord knows. He’s not even an ideologue: Insofar as he appears to be following some script, I suspect he’s simply intuiting how the “scenes” should logically proceed as one goes about trying to consolidate power. He’s a Caesar by instinct, not by tutelage.

What he really is at heart, though, is a sh-tposter.

That’s the second way to understand his first month. Forget the authoritarian playbook: Day by day we’re finding out what it would look like if we handed the federal government over to the same slimy alt-right blowhards who have colonized Twitter and let them have their run of the place.

If you’re unfamiliar with the species, check the replies to literally any tweet posted by a prominent conservative commentator in the Jonah Goldberg or David French mold. Illiberal, deeply conspiratorial, occasionally racist, and far more often than not grossly ignorant of or dishonest about basic reality: That’s the populist “reply guy” in 2025.

That’s who’s running the U.S. government now.

I was thinking about that yesterday, the day the American-led world order officially ended, as I watched the president mumble about making sure all of the gold that’s supposed to be at Fort Knox is still there. Who and what led him to believe it might not be? Why is that a priority for him? I have no idea.

But I bet the reply guys know.

“Twitter isn’t real life.” You’ll hear that said as a rebuke anytime some fringy political hobby horse gains traction on the platform among one side or the other. The idea is that the manic self-radicalized activists who create and consume propaganda on social media all day long are out of touch with the priorities of mainstream American voters. What excites the average mentally unbalanced edgelord politically isn’t what excites normies. Twitter isn’t real life!

Except … it is. Now it is. Not only is Twitter real life, it’s begun setting policy for the world’s most powerful country and the rest of the international order.

DOGE days.

Exhibit A in the case that Twitter has become real life is the fact that the second-most powerful man in the government happens to, er, own Twitter, a.k.a. X.

Which is ironic, because the guy who’s supposed to be the second-most powerful man in the government seems to spend most of his own time sh-tposting there.

There’s a little more to Elon Musk’s biography than his social media business, you might point out, which is fair enough. It’s not Twitter that’s earned him the momentary benefit of the doubt from Americans about his new government role; it’s Tesla and SpaceX and the minor distinction he’s earned for having become the most successful human in history as measured by personal wealth. Putting a visionary titan of industry in charge of government efficiency isn’t inherently crazy.

But Twitter isn’t just an asset in Musk’s portfolio. The culture of the platform has come to feel like a window onto his psyche as he endlessly freebases populist hysteria. Literally no one, Donald Trump included, does more there to promote whatever insanity the grassroots right happens to have latched onto on a given day. He radiates a sense of being under the influence of something powerful, mind-altering, and malign. (More than one thing, maybe.) Illiberal, conspiratorial, occasionally racist, and remorselessly dishonest or uninformed—the hallmarks of the populist reply guy—are the very definition of Elon’s Twitter persona.

No surprise, then, that the version of Musk Americans have gotten at the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) isn’t the tech wizard who succeeded in landing rockets safely on their own launchpads. It’s the brain-poisoned Jacobin who’s bent on purging the cultural enemies of the postliberal right and is proceeding in his new duties with precisely the degree of care and competence you’d expect from a loudmouthed Twitter ignoramus thrust suddenly into a position of great importance.

The quickest way to convey how inept and deceitful DOGE has been about its work is to refer you to Wired’s list of the outfit’s many screw-ups, but one episode nicely captures the scale of the negligence. Last week Musk flagged a contract that his team discovered between the Defense Department and Reuters, a well-known news agency, worth millions of dollars for services involving “large scale social deception.” Aha—here was proof that the “deep state” has been in cahoots with the dastardly media all along. The claim was so explosive that it was picked up by the reply-guy-in-chief and duly promoted on his own social media platform.

But it wasn’t the Reuters news agency that the Pentagon had partnered with. It was Thomson Reuters, a different wing of the company specializing in tech. The “large scale social deception” mentioned in the contract was a reference to foreign propaganda; Thomson Reuters had been enlisted to provide cyberdefenses to the military. The contract was signed in 2018 under—you guessed it—President Donald Trump.

Carelessness of this magnitude would be absurd if DOGE were an earnest initiative to reduce waste. Months would be spent carefully studying the federal budget before targeting programs; an army of experts on appropriations would be enlisted to educate the team on redundancies and suspicious outlays. By running headlong instead at federal agencies and slashing spending with an attitude of “ready, fire, aim,” DOGE has ensured that it won’t just be the wasteful stuff that’s chopped. It’ll be Alzheimer’s research. And health care for 9/11 first responders. And AI infrastructure. And nuclear defense.

All of which, by the way, will barely save a dime in the grand scheme of things, especially with Trump and his party set to bury America under trillions more in annual deficits. As a fiscal project, DOGE is a farce that’s getting more farcical by the day.

“Ready, fire, aim” makes no sense as an approach to fiscal reform. But it makes lots of sense as an approach by social media addicts whose core priority is to impress their edgelord buddies by demonstrating haphazard hostility to the ruling class. Firing federal bureaucrats willy-nilly regardless of their value, hyperventilating over half-baked conspiracies between government and the left—the work of DOGE is less about making government leaner and better than about ventilating reply guys’ free-floating antipathy to the “elites.” It’s more performance than it is politics or policy.

I mean, really.

That’s also true of Twitter, of course. Even prior to the Musk era, the platform was less a place to practice political activism than to signal one’s moral virtue to like-minded activists for clout. All that’s changed over time is the political orientation of the owner. Go figure that performative antipathy to out-groups also seems to be Musk’s core concern in his side gig running the federal government.

Smashing the palace.

It’s not just DOGE, though. You’ll find various Trump administration policies infested with sensibilities more commonly found on Twitter.

Pardoning the January 6 criminals is the supreme example. According to the Washington Post, just 14 percent of Americans approve of the clemency the president granted to violent insurrectionists. Even among his usually loyal party, a measly 32 percent approve. The only place in mainstream politics where you’ll find solid support for freeing the worst of the worst imprisoned for their actions that day is inside the radicalizing hothouse that is populist Twitter. 

Fortunately for fans of coup attempts, Twitter is real life now. So not only are the worst offenders back on the streets, at least one of them is looking at running for office.

Trump’s new policy on Ukraine is also tailor-made for Twitter.

Reducing aid to Kyiv isn’t itself a fringe position. Some 67 percent of Republicans told Gallup late last year that we’ve given too much, and slightly more Americans said they preferred to see the war end quickly than said they support seeing Ukraine fight on to reclaim lost territory. It’s not just reply guys who worry that the fight is going nowhere and turning into a sinkhole for American treasure.

But it is pretty much just Twitter reply guys who are so stoned on Kremlin and/or Tucker Carlson propaganda (but I repeat myself) that they’re willing to pretend, as Trump now does, that Ukraine started the war. That’s an insane position for an American president to take; a new Quinnipiac poll finds no less than 81 percent of adults, including 73 percent of the GOP, believe Vladimir Putin isn’t to be trusted. Yet not only does Trump continue to lie on Putin’s behalf, news is swirling today that he’s resisting attempts by G7 powers to issue a joint statement condemning “Russian aggression” in Ukraine.

That’s not something any sane, mainstream American politician would normally do. Even the crustiest old red in the U.S. Congress posted a righteous video on Wednesday night putting the blame for the war where it belongs. Only on Twitter is there a meaningful constituency for the idea that Volodymyr Zelensky, not Putin, is the villain in this horror. And in the West Wing, of course, since Twitter is real life now.

Cabinet members? Nothing says “Twitter is real life” like making Robert F. Kennedy Jr. head of America’s health bureaucracy. Not even Trump or Musk typifies the special, familiar reply-guy blend of ignorance, paranoia, and cocksure confidence in one’s convictions like RFK Jr. does. Anti-vaxxism and COVID skepticism more broadly have migrated from the incubator of social media to the federal government and red-state legislatures, in fact.

Another subtler resemblance between how Trump and Twitter operate is the half-baked randomness of some of the president’s policy proposals. For years, populists on the platform have mocked progressives for their faddish interest in “The Current Thing,” a derisive term for whatever leftist cause du jour has been suddenly embraced and passionately promoted by liberal slacktivists. (Musk himself has used the term.) It’s a knock on left-wing groupthink and a jab at the shallowness of left-wing ideology. Any ol’ thing can become The Current Thing if enough liberals say so.

There’s a strong stench of “The Current Thing” to some of the Trump administration’s preoccupations, though, notably the president’s interest in annexing territory from Canada to Panama to Greenland to Gaza. None of that was on the radar of grassroots America First-ers until this past month, for hopefully obvious reasons. Now, out of nowhere, manifest destiny is The Current Thing. You’ll find plenty of reply guys dutifully warming up to it on Elon Musk’s platform. 

Even the White House’s official Twitter account sounds a little too Twitter-ish at times. Only a fool would expect decorum, never mind professionalism, from a Trump press shop, but the executive branch’s communications team should be able to manage a tone more elevated than embarrassing fangirl-ing over the president, one would think. Nope: On Wednesday it mocked up an image of Trump with a crown on his head over the caption “Long live the king” to celebrate his effort to end congestion pricing in Manhattan. A day earlier, the same account posted footage of illegal immigrants being chained ahead of a deportation flight and dubbed it “ASMR,” referring to a genre of internet videos that are designed to give viewers pleasant tingling sensations.

That’s exactly the sort of malicious slop you’d expect to find posted in Trump’s or Musk’s Twitter replies from some populist bootlicker desperate for a retweet from their authoritarian hero. Now the White House itself is generating the slop. Twitter is real life, to our collective embarrassment.

Finally, no comparison with Twitter would be complete without racism. Trump’s administration has also checked that box, going to bat for a DOGE employee known for posting things like “Normalize Indian hate,” appointing a guy with ties to white nationalists to lead the National Counterterrorism Center, and (temporarily) installing Darren Beattie in a high-ranking position at the State Department. There’s no political benefit to any of that; it’s the sort of thing you do only if you either agree with those beliefs or regard scandalizing decent people as more important than trusting lousy people with positions of power.

Racists or trolls, or both. Twitter is real life now and it’s running the country.

Is Twitter real life?

At his core, the reply guy believes that every political problem is simple and that every solution is a matter of will. We know what to do to fix things; all we need are rough men who are willing to do it. Social media is a bar with a billion barstools and every half-drunk patron is exactly the rough man for the job.

Musk’s DOGE project reeks of that same attitude. Balancing the federal budget? It’s so simple. All you need is the courage to cut this and cut that and cut some more. Cowardly time-serving bureaucrats won’t do it but men of action can, and will.

Believing that policy is a matter of will, not competence, is fantasy politics. It’s quintessentially Twitter because competence is hard and will is easy; a reply guy can’t tell you how things work but he can certainly muster the will to change how they do. A politics of will is also highly prone to spite. If you understand America’s challenges chiefly as a matter of domestic enemies imposing their malevolent will upon you, you’ll naturally conceive of solutions in terms of imposing your will on them.

This is why, as I wrote on Monday, DOGE has the feel less of surgically excising fat from the bloated federal corpus than of revolutionaries ecstatically rampaging through an imperial palace that they’ve overrun. They’ve won the battle of wills with the ancien régime! They’re inside the palace. Now comes the easy part, charting a path to a better tomorrow by … breaking anything and everything in sight.

Trumpism has always been a combination of menace and absurdity, gradually more the former than the latter with each day that passes. That also describes DOGE. And Trump’s “Putin’s the victim here” Ukraine policy. And Twitter, not coincidentally: Absurdity combined with menace is the populist reply guy to a T. Now, thanks to the White House, it’s also real life.

However.

A slew of polls came out on Thursday showing the president’s net job approval beginning to decline, even slipping underwater in some cases. It’s not the Twitter-ization of government that’s done that to him, it’s the economy. Voters have obviously noticed that certain grocery staples have become more, not less, expensive over the past month. And while that’s not Trump’s fault, the hard fact is that it’s a major problem he has yet to solve. One can’t sh-tpost one’s way out of eggs being $8 per dozen, particularly after vowing to bring down the cost of living.

So maybe Twitter isn’t real life after all, at least not for the average American voter who was expecting a reprieve at the supermarket post-Biden only to find, in the words of Donald Trump himself, that “inflation is back.” Bad things happen eventually to political parties whose concept of real life diverges too sharply from the electorate’s. Maybe, per the polling, they’ve already begun to.