How many people has the president trolled since Melania Trump’s cyberbullying speech?

Luke O'Neil
Updated
Donald Trump answers questions in the Oval Office on 20 August.
Donald Trump answers questions in the Oval Office on 20 August. Photograph: Leah Millis/Reuters

On Monday morning, Melania Trump rejoined her signature “Be Best” campaign against cyberbullying at the Federal Partners on Bullying Prevention summit in Maryland.

The first lady said in prepared remarks that social media is an integral part of children’s daily lives and has a number of positive uses, “but can also be destructive and harmful when used incorrectly”.

“‘Be Best’ chooses to focus on the importance of teaching our next generation how to conduct themselves safely and in a positive manner in an online setting,” she said.

It was a message that many children would indeed do well to hear, not to mention the child-like adults among us. But it’s one she might have better directed at her husband, who spent the morning during the event, and the subsequent 24 hours, on a voluminous tirade of spite and invective, even by the president’s already prolific standards of cyberbullying.

Donald Trump’s targets since Monday’s speech read like a retread of his Greatest Bullying Hits – Robert Mueller and his “witch-hunt”, “fake news”, even his own attorney general, Jeff Sessions – with a few new twists thrown in to keep people guessing.

Chief among his targets on Monday to Tuesday was John Brennan, “the worst CIA director in our country’s history” and a “political hack”, whose security clearance the president recently revoked in an apparent act of political retribution.

Elsewhere Bruce Ohr, former associate deputy attorney general and regular punching bag of Trump’s owing to his tenuous connections to the Steele dossier, came into the crosshairs, with a cutting aside to Jeff Sessions and his “‘Justice’ Department”.

Trump has weirdly had a long grievance with the US postal service, who he dinged here for contributing to the supply of fentanyl coming into the country. China also took a hit on the chin for this one. (No mention of the homemade poison/prescription opioids killing Americans, though.)

Next up, step forward former CIA analyst Philip Mudd, who has been on TV criticizing Trump’s politicization of the security clearance issue so he’s naturally in line for a tongue lashing.

Then Trump took issue with reporting in the New Yorker, not a regular target on his laundry list of “fake news” publications, and given the length and depth of pieces in that publication it’s very unlikely to be high on his “reading” list.

Other Trump hits were more predictable and familiar – including Democrats and “open borders”.

And then there was the old favorite, Robert Mueller and “angry Democrat thugs”.

And not forgetting Hillary Clinton’s “deleted emails” …

... and the the rigged witch-hunt. It’s not entirely clear how these fit with Melania Trump’s speech about people conducting “themselves safely and in a positive manner in an online setting”.

When asked about the irony of her remarks coming from someone married to the world’s pre-eminent cyberbully, the first lady’s spokesperson, Stephanie Grisham, attempted to brush it aside in a tweet.

“She is aware of the criticism but it will not deter her from doing what she feels is right,” Grisham later added in a statement to the media. “The president is proud of her commitment to children and encourages her in all that she does.”

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