What The Fuck, America?

NEW COMIC TUESDAYS AND FRIDAYS AND WHEN THE MOOD STRIKES

I couldn't resist. I had to commemorate what I experienced as a great moment in social media. Call it the Covfefe Effect. It was our Woodstock, and everyone took the brown acid.

It was kicked off at just after midnight Eastern Daylight Time when Donald J. Trump fired up his personal account and tweeted, "Despite the constant negative press covfefe" and nothing else. No punctuation, no follow-up.

And Twitter LOST IT.

At first it was pretty mellow: Ha ha, Trump made another typo during his usual late-night Twitterfest. Wonder how long he'll leave it up? But then minutes passed and people began to speculate: Did he die? Just croak on the toilet? Stroke out in bed? After a bit people were tweeting to Trump: Are you okay? Do you need us to send someone over? Someone tagged Ivanka and Junior and asked them if maybe they wanted to go check on Dad.

When it was clear no one was minding the store—that the putatively most powerful person on the planet was so out of it and so detached from any helpful staff or otherwise responsible adult that he could toss out an obviously broken sentence fragment for the entire world to read and no one would step in at all—all the stupid craziness of the modern internet broke loose. Within minutes there was a covfefe subreddit, six definitions of covfefe on the Urban Dictionary, someone had registered covfefe.com. People were writing poetry, switching up the lyrics to pop songs. Covfefe the Strong appeared, claiming he'd been summoned, and got into an argument with the Wizard Covfefe, who claimed precedence thanks to the Great Orb of T'kketh. Right-wingers asked if we had anything better to do and were roundly mocked. Polls were posted to determine the pronunication of covfefe; Merriam-Webster went meta.

I intended to go to bed but ended up on Covfefe Vigil, waiting over two hours to see when it would be taken down, reading everything on Twitter, and trying not to guffaw and wake the family.

It may sound asinine but I felt I was part of a happy group drunk on stupidity and it was glorious.

For five and a half hours we all came together, all the good people of the internet. And a few total dipsticks.

In the end all the speculation meant nothing: Trump is still with us, still demented (possibly clinically), the sky is still falling. But for a little while, how we laughed.

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