O envy! Envy! Thou gnawing worm of virtue, and spring of infinite mischiefs! There is no other vice, my Sancho, but pleads some pleasure in its excuse...but envy is always attended by disgust, rancor, and distracting rage.
—Cervantes, Don Quixote
It is all explained by envy. Who’d have thought it? It was envy that inspired tweets early in the morning on March 4, 2017.
Tweets, as followers of DJT know, are vehicles that impart the most important information DJT has to share with his devoted and adoring followers. Tweets, by their nature, are limited to very few words, and their virtue lies in their ability to impart, but nothing more, important bits of information. They are not expected to, nor do they, offer any support for their assertions. With tweets it is the information, not its source, that matters. Once imparted, others can be expected to corroborate the tweet, if its validity is questioned.
At about 4 A.M. on March 4, 2017, DJT awakened and, egged on by envy, and seeking a way to tame her, he recalled a Breitbart news story from the preceding day. In that story, Breitbart had referred to “known steps taken by President Barack Obama’s administration in its last months, to undermine Donald Trump’s presidential campaign and, later, his new administration.” As DJT contemplated that story, he thought up a way to dispatch envy by diminishing her cause. At 4:35 A.M. he tweeted that he had “Just found out that Obama had my ‘wires tapped’ in Trump Tower. . . This is McCarthyism!” Having implicated the former president in a nefarious scheme, even though it lacked even a semblance of truth, DJT felt better. His envy of the former president abated for fourteen minutes. At the end of fourteen minutes, DJT realized that to firmly squelch envy he needed to comment further. At 4:49 A.M.he sent another tweet asking whether it was “legal for a sitting president to be ‘wire tapping’ a race for president prior to an election? Turned down by court earlier. A NEW LOW.” The important new information imparted by the 4:49 A.M. tweet that was not included in the earlier tweet, was that a court had turned something down earlier. The inference was that the turn down pertained to the wiretapping, but that wasn’t said, nor has anything been suggested since, nor does anyone know, to what court DJT was referring.
Having sent out the second tweet, DJT sat in his room believing he had evened the score, and was content for thirteen minutes. At 5:02 A.M. he realized he had not said something in his earlier tweets that needed saying. He sent out another tweet in which he asked: “How low has President Obama gone to tapp [sic] my phones during the very sacred election process. This is Nixon/Watergate. Bad (or sick) guy!” (The misspelling of the word “tap” might suggest that DJT was so agitated he just hit the ‘p” twice but, as numerous commentators have observed, messages from DJT and his White House are commonly filled with misspellings, since among the many skills not required of those who work for DJT, spelling is included. Indeed, spelling errors are so common, that if one encountered an anonymous misspelled tweet dealing with matters of government, one could safely assume it came from DJT or one of his operatives.)
Since many commentators have compared the speed with which President Obama selected and obtained approval for cabinet members he was required to appoint, to the speed at which DJT has accomplished the same task, one might assume that the perceived slowness of the DJT process and observations about that, is what inspired envy. That is not, however, its source. DJT knows that he will someday have made all the appointments he believes are needed, and the appointees will all be far more qualified than any appointees appointed by any other president since before Washington became president which, all would agree, is a very long time ago. The source of DJT’s envy is an honor bestowed on Barack Obama that has nothing to do with what he accomplished in his first 40 days. It has to do with the fact that nine days after President Obama took office, he was nominated to receive the Nobel Peace Prize, and in October of his first year in office, he received the prize. Although this has not been commented on in the press, it is this achievement that galls DJT. Although DJT is among the 318 people who have been nominated this year, he was nominated by an unidentified American and, as far as is known, (a) was not nominated within the first nine days of his presidency and (b) is a prize he is unlikely to receive. The suggestion that Mr. Obama tapped DJT’s phone alleviates envy’s distracting rage that so obviously afflicts him and awakens in him the need for a twitter storm. That is perfectly understandable.
