Whenever big news breaks,???????? ???????? ?????? it tends to take over Twitter within minutes. Surprising nobody, the president of the United States announcing via tweet that he and the First Lady have contracted COVID-19 sent what seemed like every user on the Bird Site diving for their phones.
Trump's tweet came in the middle of the night on the East Coast, and there are unlikely to be many further developments until the morning — meaning that Twitter is obviously rife with speculation, conspiracy theories, and memes of various taste levels.
There's also no shortage of attempts to game out the next few weeks, as though literally anybodyhas any idea what happens when a sitting president contracts a potentially deadly virus 35 days out from a presidential election he's actively trying to undermine while behind in the polls.
And understandably — given the anger and grief across a nation that's been devastated by a catastrophically incompetent federal response to a pandemic and that president's months of downplaying its severity — a wave of schadenfreude that can probably be seen from space swept across the platform in minutes. It was chased by feebler calls for the very civility and generosity of spirit Trump himself has failed to display for the 208,000 Americans who have lost their lives to COVID so far.
Anyway, literally nobody knows how to process this right now, so here are some tweets about it.
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And as always, there are the meta tweets about how bananas Twitter gets during these moments.
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In sum:
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