Should The Toddler-in-Chief Thread Be Revived?

I curated a Twitter thread for most of Trump's first term. Does that baton need to be picked up again?

Photo by Jakub Kriz on Unsplash

With Donald Trump’s return to the White House next January 20th, I have been asked repeatedly on social media whether I will revive the Toddler in Chief thread. And I do not have a great answer.

For those unfamiliar readers: on April 25, 2017, I began a Twitter thread that documented all the times someone who had a rooting interest in Donald Trump’s success — a staffer, a subordinate, a co-partisan, a treaty ally, a Fox News host — described the 45th president like he was a petulant toddler. Each report was accompanied by some variation of, “I’ll believe that Trump is growing into the presidency when his staff stops talking about him like a toddler.”

The thread was inspired by a few CNN commentators claiming, early in Trump’s tenure, that he was growing into the presidency. To be fair, most Americans hoped that this would be true, but I had my doubts. When the Washington Post ran a story featuring Trump’s staffers describing him like a three-year old who refused to go to bed, I thought the trend merited some documentation.

The Toddler in Chief thread eventually ran to 2,617 tweets, with the last one posted less than an hour before Trump left office. It proved to be such a fertile source of data that I was wrote a university press book — The Toddler in Chief: What Donald Trump Teaches Us about the Modern Presidency — and published a peer-reviewed article in International Affairs — “Immature leadership: Donald Trump and the American presidency” — based on it.

It is therefore understandable that folks wonder whether I will resuscitate the thread beginning on January 20th. I am uncertain of many things, but Donald Trump’s inability to grow into the presidency is not one of them. Just as a for instance, consider this snippet from Politico’s Playbook regarding Trump’s decision to nominate Matt Gaetz to be Attorney General:

The Gaetz-for-AG plan came together yesterday, just hours before it was announced, Meridith [Lee Hill] tells us. It was hatched aboard Trump’s airplane en route to Washington, on which Gaetz was a passenger. A Trump official revealed more details to Playbook late last night: Boris Estephyn played a central role in the development, lobbying Trump to choose Gaetz while incoming White House chief of staff Susie Wiles was in a different, adjacent room on the plane, apparently unaware.

Poor impulse control? Oppositional behavior? Yeah, this is toddler-level decision-making.

For a whole bunch of reasons, however, I am leaning towards not reprising the thread for Trump’s second term. I could be persuaded otherwise, but it would take some really compelling arguments. Because the more I think about it, the less inclined I am to revive it.

I can think of four reasons not to revive the thread. In ascending order of importance:

1. First, even if I were to resurrect the thread, I sure as hell would not do it on Twitter, for reasons given in this space last year. Threads is out as well, since for the life of me I cannot figure out how to properly thread posts there. No, it would have to be on Bluesky, which is admittedly growing by leaps and bounds but is not exactly the focal point Twitter-That-Was, um, was.

2. It’s not the most important thing, but I strongly suspect there will be less material this time around. To be clear, it’s not because Donald Trump has matured — if anything, he seemed to be decompensating by the day during the campaign. But for a thread like this to have material, there must be two necessary conditions: a set of Trump staffers and subordinates willing to blab, and a media environment willing to report on it.

   The first condition will be weakened slightly — Trump has more loyalists this time around. True, any kitchen cabinet that includes the likes of Elon Musk, RFK Jr., Vivek Ramaswamy, Tulsi Gabbard, and Charlie Kirk will leak like a sieve. But I suspect that leaking is likely to be directed at each other more than Trump.

   Even if the staff proves to be almost as chatty as they did last time, I also have doubts about the mainstream media coverage of Trump this time around. They did not handle his 2024 campaign well. There were incipient signs that media moguls were wary of crossing Trump. In other words, the immature ore to be mined might be of a poorer grade in Trump 2.0.

3. As I wrote four years ago, by the end of Trump’s first term the act of curation had taken its toll:

   The opportunity cost of archiving Trump’s immature behavior for four years has been considerable. Don’t get me wrong — in a macro sense, paying attention to instability within the Oval Office made sense. But it exacted a cost. My scholarship has suffered, my knowledge about the rest of the world has eroded, my sense of equilibrium has succumbed to vertigo.

   Ordinarily I take a break from Twitter once a quarter to gain my bearings, but this was impossible over the past six months of utter insanity. As Trump decompensated, being on Twitter became a constant demand. Prolonged exposure to Trump has made me meaner and dumber than I ever wanted to be.

   I am wary of returning to that mindset for another four years.

4. Finally, the balance between comedy and carnage is more askew. The Toddler in Chief thread had legs because it perfectly captured the bizarre confluence of idiocy and malignancy that was Trump’s first term. Sure, the 45th president did a lot of bad things, but the toddler thread served as a humorous reminder of just how ill-suited he was to be president. Trump committed many amusing policy own-goals. He also floated inane proposals like trade Puerto Rico for Greenland or nuking a hurricane.

   The pandemic wiped away most of the humor side of that equation — and what humor remained was eviscerated by Trump’s actions leading up to January 6th. This time around, I expect a somewhat more coherent brand of Trumpism being implemented by his allies, even if Trump himself has a short attention span. Just imagine the carnage that Matt Gaetz, Pete Hegseth, or RFK Jr. can wreak in their departments. Imagine what Stephen Miller can do, and suddenly very little about Trump’s immaturity is funny anymore. So I am wary of propagating a theme that makes Trump appear inoffensive or harmless when he is decidedly neither.

Or maybe I am overthinking all this! Readers, feel free to weigh in on whether the toddler thread is worth reviving in the comments. And if you want me to do it, offer some compelling counterarguments!