Existing comment:
"ILLEGAL VOTERS"
27 NOV 2016 - 3:30 PM
MEDIUM: TWITTER FOR ANDROID
DIMENSIONS: 140 CHARACTERS
What is reality? That -- and nothing less -- is the question so urgently posed by "Illegal Voters," the first undisputed masterpiece of Trump's controversial "President of the United States" period.
Here, concision masks a deceptively sophisticated structure. Trump first affirms conventional "facts" by citing his universally acknowledged electoral college victory. But already the trickster is tipping his hand: Note the sly subversion of "landslide" from its usual meaning to the exact opposite of that. This syntactic "error" quickly reveals itself as a rhetorical cliff's edge, off which Trump gleefully dives into an almost psychedelic fantasy world where he also won the popular vote, according to a hypothetical ("if you deduct the millions . . .") based on a known falsehood (about widespread voter fraud).
Tasting freedom as though for the first time, Trump builds his White House castle not just on sand, but imaginary sand. The viewer is left to ponder "Illegal Voters"' destabilizing effect on the world's oldest democracy, nurse a migraine, and perhaps answer emails from the very real Commission on Voter Fraud, whose multi-million-dollar, eight-month, results-less inquiry this tweet necessitated. |