Donald Trump Can’t Stop Posting

Updated at 5:31 p.m. ET on September 12, 2024

During last night’s debate, Donald Trump said some strange things, even by his own standards. He praised the Hungarian leader Viktor Orbán (using the antidemocratic term strongman approvingly); lamented that immigrants in Springfield, Ohio, are “eating the dogs”; and suggested that Kamala Harris wants to do “transgender operations on illegal aliens that are in prison.” This is not merely the stuff of normal Trumpian discourse. This is the stuff of someone who is merely spending way too much time on the right-wing internet. (To be clear, in 2019, Harris did tell the ACLU in response to a questionnaire that she supports policies that allow federal prisoners and detainees to “obtain medically necessary care for gender transition, including surgical care, while incarcerated or detained.”)

Trump has long used the internet prolifically. But recently, he has exhibited himself as someone who is not simply on the internet, but as someone who is of the internet. In real life, he speaks in posts emblematic of the terminally online. Orbán is a figure who is dear to much of the online far right for his moves to erode Hungarian democracy but who is likely not a well-known figure to most voters. “Transgender operations for illegal aliens in prison” is a phrase ChatGPT would spit out if you fed it right-wing posts and asked it to parody them. Haitian immigrants eating people’s pets in Ohio is a hallucination that was born on the right-wing internet as well.