A Twitter trip to Trumpton


So, Donald Judas* Trump has cleared the number of delegates needed to become the Republican nominee for US President. Which keeps Sounds of Soldiers relevant, and means it stays at 99p/99c at least until November.

To get a feeling for Trump supporters, I’ve been conducting an experiment for the last couple of weeks. I’m following the Twitter stream of one, vocal Trumpeter, highlighting bigoted tweets or retweets from him. I didn’t just pick him at random. In fact, he picked me. I have a twitter account for Garth Owen, and when I put something out on there that mentioned Trump, it got a follow from this guy. He mostly goes on about how awesome Trump is, rather than spewing almost constant racism and hate, as I’ve found others doing within one or two retweets of him. So I haven’t gone out of my way to find the worst example possible, before anyone starts accusing me of that.

What sort of stuff have I found on his timeline? Let’s see-



One remove from my test subject, I found this intelligent commentary. (Update having revisited this account, it now looks more like a parody)-



“Not one of us” What could that possibly mean?



And that’s not including the extended conversations I go into, which included gems such as-



This is just a scratch of the surface, and a few of the tweets I’ve seen this week. I’m going to keep watching, because it’s car-crash levels of compelling. It’s going to be a long, darkly comic and worrying run up to the US elections. Expect irregular trips back to Trumpton.

*What does the J stand for? I recently rewatched a lot of Red Dwarf, so sticking Judas in there is the natural reaction.