You might imagine that a senator would have a way of communicating with the president other than an endless series of pitifully one-sided tweets. Surely, you think, a senator — let’s say a seven-term senator — who wanted to share a newspaper column with the president might have a means for doing so beyond his own burbling Twitter feed.
I’m afraid you’re unfamiliar with Chuck Grassley, the Republican senior senator from Iowa, who, like so many of his fellow Americans, has spent the first year of the Trump era shouting incoherent things at the president on the internet.
Grassley is the chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee. He is also a man whose Twitter aesthetic is best described as “19th-century village drunk tries to send a telegraph.” Concision reigns. Typos flower. Words cling together, as if for safety. He once tweeted an anecdote about hitting a deer, presumably with a car. “Assume deer dead,” he concluded.
For whatever reason, Grassley has decided that Twitter is the ideal medium through which to communicate with President Donald Trump. Below is a year’s worth of Grassley bellowing into the void about Iowa and ethanol and Wall Street Journal columnist Peggy Noonan, apparently in a vain attempt at influencing a man who will never even hear his half-literate cries. Here’s to three more years of this. Please no one tell Chuck Grassley about phones.