On Trump indictment day, Twitter is good again

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Elon Musk’s Twitter may be a dying platform, a Jenga tower of baffling new features stacked atop the gaps where useful ones used to be, but there are still days when it is simply the best place to munch popcorn and enjoy jokes about the news in real time. Thursday March 30 was one of those days.

News broke in the early evening, New York time, that a Manhattan grand jury voted to indict former president Donald Trump on charges relating to alleged hush money paid to porn performer Stormy Daniels ahead of the 2016 election to cover up a brief sexual relationship. It’s one of four criminal investigations(Opens in a new tab) currently looking into the former president’s activities — alongside two from the DoJ regarding the Jan. 6 insurrection and mishandling of classified documents, and one relating to election interference in Fulton County, Georgia — but it’s the first to result in actual charges against Trump himself.

Watchers in both Trump’s camp and the media more broadly had been expecting the indictment as early as last Tuesday, so the political wits and meme dealers of Twitter had some time to prep their gags. But as always, the news was met by a cascade of classic memes, inside jokes, and well-seasoned schadenfreude.

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Some were generous enough to reference Trump’s career highs.

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Won’t somebody please think of the late night shows?

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Speaking of rich people, the verdict in Gwyneth Paltrow’s ski-accident civil suit came down within the hour of the Trump announcement.

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Early reports about the substance of Trump’s actual indictment hinted at a whopping 34 counts(Opens in a new tab) of falsifying documents.

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And Trump’s own response to the news, of course, added fuel to the fire as only he can.

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Pelting digital tomatoes at Trump on his perp walk is always fun, but it should always be in the context of the untold damage he’s done to real people in his decades of public life as a rich, vainglorious, racist shithead. The final word — literally — should go to one of those people.