By Evgeniya Pakhomova
The outcomes of the first night looked pessimistic for supporters of Joe Biden. A short glimpse through Twitter at the time revealed a lot of Democratic supporters fighting with disillusionment and political exhaustion. However, the tone has drastically changed once an initial Republican lead in the swing states started disappearing with the counting of the mail-in votes. Once Wisconsin was called, a renewed sense of hope emerged for the rest of the states where the gap between the Republicans and the Democrats was slowly but surely closing. However, that was not the only thing that changed: one of the central figures of the election, Donald Trump, famous for his outspoken engagement with Twitter, was getting more and more erratic and aggressive in the tone of his tweets. It should be mentioned that although Trump’s tweets have already been the subject of numerous jokes, the new baseless complaints of a tarnished politician faced with an almost inevitable loss opened the floodgates of satirical humour.
A notable example of this is a “Twitter thread” made by a drag queen Trixie Mattel, a character embodied by Brian Firkus. It started from Firkus mockingly subverting Trump’s claim of fake ballots being found across the swing states, by suggesting that ballots which are found in ballot boxes constitute a perfectly legal reason to send the current president packing. And once a suspected bot account created under the name Patty responded negatively to Trixie Mattel’s joke, Firkus condescendingly replied with a short message “Patty don’t start” (sic). Within hours, this last tweet “blew up” – people were re-tweeting and replying, taking the joke further, talking about their own experiences with “trolling” Trump supporters online. “Patty” became the new “Karen” – a stereotypical term used for referring to ignorant female white middle-class Trump supporters. At the moment of this article being written, the hashtag #PattyDontStart approximately had more than two hundred thousand potential impressions.
In the past decade, Twitter has turned into an arena for various political discussions. Humour and satire have been an integral part of this process. Whenever any mistake made by a politician gets exposed in public, communities of Twitter users rapidly respond with irony and mockery. This tactic is used equally in response to the more traditional “establishment” politicians (for example, in the case of Dominic Cummings breaking the lockdown rules in the UK[1]), and to the populist ones. However, the difference is that majority of populist politicians, including Donald Trump, share the platform with their supporters and their opponents in a more intimate, direct way. In a sense, this creates an equal playing field: a satirical/humorous/ironic response can attract even more attention than the original tweet.
Of course, one can argue that humour, irony, and satire on Twitter nevertheless belong to the category of the “weapons of the weak” as once defined by James Scott[2]. After all, Twitter threads in themselves have little impact in destabilising the “real world” power. However, an important lesson can be learned from this phenomenon. The reason why populist politicians rely more extensively on social media is because they derive their influence from making powerful, catchy statements to mobilise the political imagination of their followers. Unfortunately, Donald Trump’s presidency has made it painfully clear that this imaginative influence is stronger than the opponents’ attempts to reason and point out the fallacies in the populist arguments. From this perspective, the critique made by Twitter users is frequently far more effective because it subverts the discourse of the statement rather than the content. It frames populist politicians as hilarious in their bloated grandeur rather than incompetent. If the source of political influence lies in the discursive power of a fearless politician, then a condescending “Patty don’t start” can sometimes do more damage than any “reasonable” appeals to the truth.
[1] Sam Bright, https://twitter.com/WritesBright/status/1327195088200544257
[2] Scott, J.C. 1985. Weapons of the Weak: Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance. Yale University Press.
A little about Evgeniya:
Evgeniya Pakhomova is taking a master’s degree in Social Anthropology at the London School of Economics and Political Science. She has graduated from the University of St Andrews with a degree in Art History and Social Anthropology.
