In His Own Words

The Case Against Donald J. Trump

PLEASE NOTE: This piece is best experienced on the Substack website or in the Substack app. If you’re reading it in email, I’d encourage you to click on the title above (“In His Own Words”) and you’ll be taken to the article page, where you’ll be able to flip through the full, uncropped versions of the images featured below.

It’s less than two weeks before voting is over in the U.S. presidential election. Though I’ve lived in Italy for two years, my mind is very much in my homeland.¹

While I recognize that a significant percentage of my readers are not American, I hope you’ll bear with me in these closing days of this election, as I focus on what is arguably the most important story in the world right now, an event with ramifications that will be felt worldwide, for better or worse.

~~~~~~~

Shortly after Donald Trump rode down the escalator in 2015 and announced he was running for President of the United States, I began taking screenshots on my phone to document what was happening in my country, though I never knew exactly what—if anything—I would do with these images. (I now have about 10,000 such captures.)

Millions of alarmed and outraged words about Donald Trump have been put into the universe in the last nine years. But I think perhaps the strongest argument against him isn’t what newspaper editors or podcast hosts or cable news pundits say; it’s what The Donald himself says—especially on X/Twitter, where he has tweeted more than 59,000 (!) times.²

Trump’s tweets give us an unfiltered glimpse into his mind³, which—even while president—was focused mostly on himself, his TV ratings, his pet conspiracy theories, his childish nicknames, and his unquenchable thirst for vengeance against those he deems his “enemies.” They show us a petty and aggrieved man who endlessly whines, boasts, and brags.

I’ve decided to share a selection of his tweets here. This is who he really is, and he is deeply unwell. As you flip through these—again, best viewed on the Substack website or in the Substack app—ask yourself if you would be comfortable having this man as your child’s Little League coach. What about as your boss? Your company’s CEO? The mayor of your city? The governor of your state?

Donald Trump is asking American voters to return him to the most powerful position in the country, perhaps in the world. And the polls show that there’s a roughly 50/50 chance they’ll do just that. I find that to be truly alarming. Please don’t vote to put this tweeter in charge of the world’s largest arsenal of nuclear weapons, the world’s premier democracy, and the world’s leading economy.

As Kamala Harris has said often in recent weeks, Trump is in many ways a deeply unserious man, but the consequences of him returning to the Oval Office would be deeply serious.  

1. At the moment, my body is also in my homeland, as I’m in the midst of a whirlwind six-day trip on the East Coast for a family wedding.

2. I realize Trump now has his own social media company, Truth Social, started after he was suspended from Twitter for instigating a violent insurrection against the United States. But I’ve not joined that platform, so anything I’ve seen from it has been from others posting his “truths” to other social platforms.

3. I created this word cloud image on freewordcloudgenerator.com