The Night Trump Blocked Me on Twitter.

Somewhere in a tunnel between West 4th and 2nd Ave, I got up the President's nose.

I’d just finished my last comedy spot for the night (and my fifth whiskey) and descended into the subway at West 4th. The first two spots didn’t go well, the last one did. I was on a high.

It was late, and I was one of only a few people standing on the platform. The train was nowhere in sight. I pulled out my phone and started doomscrolling to see what fresh hell had unfolded since I last checked in. It was 2017, and the new President was still finding his bone-spurred feet in DC. By that, I mean he was constently tweeting from the toilet at 2 in the morning.

A minute prior to opening the app, he had just tweeted something about the Muslim ban. Some unhinged rant about sending them back to their countries, followed by several non-sequiturs in ALL-CAPS, capped off with his signature slogan: MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN!

I replied. (I never reply). But I was feeling silly, and a bit drunk. The high from my set was still buzzing through me. Nothing mattered anymore.

I don’t remember precisely what I said, but it was some quippy smartass line asking if it might be time to close out his tab and shuffle home to his empty bed. (Melania still hadn’t moved into the Whitehouse.) Now, at this point, I did not know Trump didn’t drink. I also did not know his older brother, Fred Jr, had died at 41 of a heart attack caused by alcoholism. Eep.

I hit ‘send’ just as the downtown F train arrived. I stepped into the empty carriage which, for once, didn’t contain any human remains or excrement. As I sat down I continued scrolling his feed to see what else he’d unloaded onto the American psyche that day. Just as the train slipped between stations, my reception cut out.

When we pulled into Broadway/Lafayette, a small Puerto Rican woman came in and sat right next to me. We were the only two people in the carriage. I hit ‘refresh’ on the feed to continue reading. That was when I first saw this message…

I mumbled “What the ffffu…” as the woman next to me grunted loudly. I turned to face her and noticed she was wearing a cross around her neck. “I think the President just …blocked me,” I said. She said nothing. (Why would she?)

I closed the app just in case it had something to do with losing reception between stations. I reopened Twitter and searched for @realDonaldTrump in the search bar. Nothing came up. I went to the browser on Twitter and typed @RealDonaldTrump into Google, which yielded a CNN article with one of his tweets embedded. It had an error message in the box with the tweet in it.

This couldn’t be right.

I jumped off at 2nd Avenue and quickly walked home to log in on my laptop and see if it was just a bug. I went to his profile on my browser and saw this…

For the rest of his term, from 2017 all the way through to late 2020, I was unable to see any of his tweets. It was unadulterated bliss. I’d hear about them second-hand from reporting (ie. “Trump fired Comey on Twitter”) but never actually had to see any of his vacuous dross in my feed. To this day, this is what I see when I look at his profile on the dumpster fire now known as X: