On 2 June, 2016, Dan Rebellato, visiting professor at the Sorbonne, was following his heavily pregnant wife to bed when he was struck by a thought about Republican presidential candidate Donald J. Trump. He sat down at the little table in his cramped apartment in Paris’s fifth arrondissement, opened Twitter on his iPhone, and tapped out a message, addressing it to Trump himself.
“Night night you disgusting halfwit. xx,” Rebellato tweeted. Chuckling to himself, he switched off the lights and went to bed.
At 21:18 the next evening, Rebellato sent the tweet again. As a playwright and academic – he is now professor of contemporary theatre at Royal Holloway, University of London – the message appealed to him as both statement and gesture. “Disgusting” captured Trump’s moral, physical and personal repulsiveness; “halfwit” his ignorance and irrationality. Plus, it hadn’t got enough likes the first time around.
The following night, still not thinking much of it, he sent the exact same message again, right down to the arch flourish of the “xx”.
Twice is coincidence; three times is habit. Nearly two years later, Rebellato is still wishing Trump goodnight in precisely the same way. Every night, usually around 23:00, he types the camp, rude missive and sends it to the President of the United States. Since that day in June, he has only missed one night. The joke Rebellato only intended to tell once has now been repeated almost 700 times.
“It's really stupid,” says Rebellato, “because obviously it takes no time at all. But if it gets to 10pm, I think, ‘Oh fuck, I have to do it.’”
Why? Rebellato doesn’t know – he just does. “It really does feel like I have to do it. Like I have an obligation. There's no logic particularly that says I have to carry on doing it, but it feels like I will until he leaves office.”
Trolling Trump on Twitter is now a global pastime, but Rebellato was doing it long before it became fashionable. Of the 95,500 plus tweets he has sent since joining Twitter in December 2008, more than 3,500 have been directed at the billionaire. (“There’s something fucking wrong with me,” he said, when he sent over this information.) The first came in May 2012, when Trump began pushing the racist “birther” conspiracy theory as part of a mooted presidential run.
On Twitter, Rebellato posted a link to a belligerent CNN interview. “Donald Trump,” he wrote. “What a ridiculous f*cking clown.”
Six months later, Obama claimed the presidency in an electoral college landslide. Trump’s brief, failed campaign was a comical afterthought – but Rebellato wasn’t about to let him forget it. The next morning, at 07:33, he dug out an old Trump tweet – “I never fall for scams. I am the only person who immediately walked out of my ‘Ali G’ interview” – to send the billionaire mocking congratulations on his “maturity, wisdom and dignity.”
The message seemed to fire Rebellato’s imagination, because a few days later he sent his first series of Trump tweets:
.@realDonaldTrump In the UK, the word 'Trump' means 'Fart'. This is very undignified for a man of your accomplishments. Can you do anything?
.@realDonaldTrump Have you managed to do anything about the word 'trump' meaning 'fart' in the UK? You must know people. You need to act.
.@realDonaldTrump I suspect trump meaning 'fart' in the UK to be the work of COMMUNIST LEXICOGRAPHERS. Surely something can be done?
With these early messages, Rebellato defined two of his favourite Trump trolling styles: mock sincerity and outright insult. (As well as a clown, he has called Trump an “evil cretin”, a “complete penis” and “narcissistic moronic cockwomble.” When Trump encouraged his Twitter followers to order signed copies of his book Crippled America, Rebellato fired back: “I'd rather eat my own toenails, you stupid racist arsehole.”) A third form emerged in October 2013, by which point Rebellato was sending Trump around five tweets a month:
Trump: “Obama can open the Mall for illegals to protest our country yet he continues to barricade WWII memorial. That’s an absolute disgrace.”
Rebellato: “I love it when you get all worked up. Give us a kiss.”
With this tone of camp affection –
Trump: “Whether you like Obama or not, Bob Gates turned out to be one disloyal dude! Personally, I hate rats”
Rebellato: “I hate rats TOO! Listen, at the end of March, dudes can get married here. Shall we go for a drink and see if we click?”
– the elements for “Night night you disgusting halfwit. xx” had come together. But to be truly inspired, Rebellato had to wait until his muse ran, once again, for president.
Read more: Revealed: The real identity of prankster king SINON_REBORN
As well as coming early to Trump on Twitter, Rebellato was also quick to spot his political potential. “I so hope you become president,” he wrote to Trump on June 13, 2014. “I would be honored to attend your inauguration, openly pleasuring myself in celebration.” A few days later he added: “Hey Donald! Please please please please run for President! It would be really funny unless you win!”
“That’s not so funny now,” he says, when I read him that tweet. “But everybody thought he was going to lose. Maybe Steve Bannon. I bet even he thought, ‘We're not going to win this, but we'll have a really good shot at it.’”
On November 8, 2016, the day of the American election, Rebellato wrote: “Okay. And I hope this is the last time I need to do this...” Then he sent his usual goodnight message. But instead of going to bed, he stayed up to watch the results come in – and, by 02:52, it was clear where they were heading.
Ironic to the last, Rebellato tweeted: “I'm beginning to think sending Donald Trump snarky tweets wasn't as politically effective as I hoped.”
Is humour his escape? “I certainly am not somebody who thinks that humor is like the valve on a pressure cooker, that it makes things more tolerable. I certainly find with Brexit, I have found myself so angry and despairing that actually it's really dysfunctional. And sometimes I feel like a really big laugh that skewers exactly why this is so fucking stupid and appalling makes me more clear-headed about what's what's going wrong.”
He pauses. “That feels like I'm trying to say I'm the equivalent of a Daily Show presenter and I'm not. I'm just sending stupid tweets. But certainly I find humour very clarifying and enlightening.”
Sometimes, all you can do is carry on. The next evening, Rebellato wrote: “I was really REALLY hoping I'd never have to remember to do this ever again but there we are. sigh” Then he wished Trump goodnight for the 161st time. One of his followers replied: “Four more years! Four more years!”
Rebellato’s tweet has a fan club. One night recently, when he didn’t tweet until five minutes past midnight, one of his followers replied: “phew late tonight .. was starting to panic :-)”. Another night, one responded: “Thank you for your continued service.” Someone else wrote, simply: “Keep going, Dan.”
“I have occasionally had people saying that this is my signal to go to bed,” says Rebellato. “People saying, this makes me laugh every evening and then I can go to bed.”
Sending abusive tweets to Trump, a president who trolled his way to power, might seem like fighting fire with lighter fluid. But unlike much of the shouting on Twitter – and unlike the relentlessly pompous and bombastic President – Rebellato is witty and self-aware. He knows his tweet is stupid. That’s exactly why he sends it.
At the same time, this commitment to absurdity is a political statement. One of the ongoing paradoxes of the Trump presidency is the way it simultaneously encourages and disables satire. The lampoon is frequently less preposterous than the reality – and, instead of puncturing it, helps to normalise it. Rebellato's tweet achieves the comic escalation Trump's behaviour renders meaningless.
Like any good piece of durational art, it also involves a certain amount of hardship. Rebellato doesn’t copy and paste his tweet, or set an alarm – although he has written the message so many times, the autosuggest on his phone brings up every word to order. (He shows me, then hurriedly deletes it: “I don't want to confuse him by thinking it's the wrong time.”) At a time when humourless fascist bots are a more powerful political force than millions of living, breathing people, it’s a reminder of human silliness and bloodymindedness.
In 2012 Rebellato bought some theatre tickets with some “outrageous fees” added to the cost. So “for about three weeks”, he says, he tweeted the company the same message: “Good morning thieves.” Then, one day, they replied asking if there was anything wrong. “At that point I kind of went, ‘Ooh, I don't really’. That stripped the fun out of doing this.”
Trump has never responded to Rebellato’s messages. He retweeted him once in 2015 – seemingly misunderstanding a sarcastic comment – but if he sees the goodnight kisses, he gives no sign. “He must at some point have just noticed it,” says Rebellato. “And because of course it's totally wrong for the time period where he is, which also makes me laugh, he must [frown] and then ignore it. But even the thought he does that makes me laugh.”
If Trump did reply, would his work be done? “I think I'd probably just carry on with bit more of a spring in my step,” Rebellato says. But whether Trump does or not isn’t the point. Rebellato isn’t waiting for anything, he’s doing it because he can. “If I were doing it because I wanted it to niggle away until he tearfully confessed his sins on live television, then I'd go, ‘Ah, this isn't going to work.’ But since I'm not that stupid, I actually think this is joyfully pointless.”
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
