Pierre Delecto Breaks the Internet
Photo by Gage Skidmore via Wikimedia Commons
Presented without further commment:
For years, Pierre Delecto’s presence on Twitter largely went unnoticed. Operating a bare-bones account with the handle, “@qaws9876,” the user’s limited activity only revealed an interest in politics — namely supporting Sen. Mitt Romney (R-Utah). So when “Pierre Delecto” started trending Sunday on the social media platform, people were understandably confused.
“Why are we talking about Pierre Delecto,” one person asked.
“WTH is a Pierre Delecto & why is everyone going crazy about it?” another wanted to know.
On Sunday, Twitter users lost their collective minds when they learned that “Pierre Delecto” wasn’t a bot or a random Romney superfan, but an account run by the Republican senator himself. As Delecto, Romney, who has become one of President Trump’s most vocal GOP critics, used the account to like critical tweets about the president, while also occasionally defending himself against detractors. By early Monday, the unusual pseudonym was a trending moment on Twitter and had been mentioned in more than 47,000 tweets.
The Romney-Delecto connection was first made by Slate’s Ashley Feinberg, who went hunting for the secret account after the senator mentioned its existence to the Atlantic in a profile published Sunday. In a follow-up call with Atlantic reporter McKay Coppins, Romney confirmed that the account, which has since been made private, is his.
“C’est moi,” Romney said after being asked about Delecto.
When reached for comment late Sunday, a spokesperson for Romney responded by emailing The Washington Post a link to a tweet from Coppins that contained Romney’s brief confirmation.
Romney brought up his covert Twitter persona during an interview with the Atlantic as he discussed Trump lashing out at him on social media.
I don’t get Mitt Romney fanboys like McKay Coppins. As one of OT’s stubborn liberals, I am not impressed by Mitt Romney’s critiques of Donald Trump by any name. Let us look at the reasons why:
1. 2012 Presidential candidate Mitt Romney also tried to run to the right on immigration. Self-deportation basically meant “make the lives of undocumented immigrants so miserable that they leave.” He also picked Paul Ryan as a veep. While not as boorish as Trump, Paul Ryan is still not exactly an intellectual heavyweight and his budget was atrocious. The only reason Romney could not pull off this far-right tact is because he looks like a Rockefeller, country-club Republican out of central casting. Trump’s rumpled look makes him like a blowhard in a bar and that is what sells the cruelty and makes people think it is going to happen.
2. Does no one besides lefties remember this photo of Romney and Trump?
https://www.google.com/search?q=Romney+Trump+dinner+photo&client=firefox-b-1-d&tbm=isch&source=iu&ictx=1&fir=f65p4KEqT2z5CM%253A%252CKs5lmpGNiK9XdM%252C_&vet=1&usg=AI4_-kSTG4gsn9QrGsrl3oz9ojbypuq3rg&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwjjwNzlyq3lAhVCGjQIHZWwD8MQ9QEwAXoECAcQBg#imgrc=f65p4KEqT2z5CM:&vet=1
Sure Romney looks really uncomfortable but this is straight of the Shining and Romney really, really wanted to be Secretary of State. If Romney were truly anti-Trump or #NeverTrump, he would have declined the dinner and the position. I don’t want to hear any bullshit about adults in the room.Report
Its part of the desperate search by editors and pundits for a respectable Republicanism.Report
It’s worse than that. Many White Democratic and non-voters voters desperately need there to be respectable White Republicans because the alternative is too horrible to contemplate. When Mathis recently gave an anti-Trump speech, there were lots of postings of the speech by White Democratic voters in my Facebook feed even though Mathis was part of the rotten administration.Report
Don’t forget the media. The media intensely needs two sides to their narrative so they are forced to constantly prop up the republicans they hate for fear of being called biased and unbalanced.Report
I think Chip covered this.Report
I don’t think this works on multiple levels Saul. Frankly the only thing Romney and Trump have in common is a party affiliation and the fact that liberals like you and I don’t like him. I think we can do better than saying that the elephant and the zombie elephant that is eating the elephant are the exact same when they clearly are not.
Romney and even more so Paul Ryan were/are tribunes of the old model Republicans who parroted the standard 90’s to 2015 Republican trifecta model of Social Conservatism/foreign policy neoconism and fiscal conservatism. It does bear noting, of course, that fiscal conservatism was, as practiced by the GOP rather than as talked of by the GOP, basically just a constant effort by the republicans to cut social services, load up on debt and then transfer those funds to the wealthy through tax cuts. Romney is an especially good example here since in his private career as a vulture capitalist he basically practiced the same scam on old school companies: buy em, liquidate their assets, load up on debt, then suck the cash out through dividends and stock buy backs then bail. The old GOP model started out as basically service for the wealthy elite while using fervent anti-communism and social Conservatism to paper over the fact that no mass of voters would vote for that on its own merits.
Trumpism isn’t the same thing. It’s more like an opportunistic infection that has crawled into the GOP body politic through the wound that opened up as anti-communism and (especially) social conservatism lost their power to make right wing voters ignore their own interests and support the Republicans even while they got screwed by them. It is populist, it’s nativist, it’s anti-liberal for the sake of being anti-liberal, it’s basically all the things the GOP flirted with to prolongue their time in control and marshal votes only escaped from their elites control and rolling along like this horrific flaming katamari of garbage. And since it’s Trump based it’s also incoherent and self-contradictory.
It’s no wonder Romney hates Trump- Trump is eating Romney’s GOP alive and, even worse, he’s not even offering a coherent vision for what’ll come after. He’s just destruction of the GOP status quos in the body of one ranting old orange New Yorker.Report
Or you could argue that Romney was no different than Obama. In the debates he wouldn’t disagree with Obama’s policies and pitched himself as someone who would be better and more competent at implementing them. In Romney family terms, he liked that cars Obama was selling, but argued that he’d be a better salesman. I didn’t like Obama’s policies, so I didn’t vote for Romney. It was primarily for those policy reasons (Why should the GOP take the blame for Obama’s policies?), but also because I already had the same view of Romney that most of the party now shares. He’s a narcissistic self-serving pandering opportunist who’s in so deep with country-club Republicans that he’s only vaguely aware that there are Americans who aren’t members of the country club, and thinks most of those must work as caddies.
Trump is the guy who builds the country clubs, among other enterprises in town, and knows that Romney’s bubble depends on a massive number of construction workers and support staff to keep it all running, and knows the typical club member, which includes the Romneys, Obamas, and the Clintons, would sell them all out to China or Russia for ten cents.
This is a tremendous recasting of the players and the interests, like when you find out that the retired hard-rock icons play golf with the country music icons because they hang out together, and always have. They both got rich and famous from selling albums and keeping their market segments entertained. It’s a business.
That business is “politics as usual”, getting the base all fired up about nonsense so they’ll hit the “donate” button, supporting a huge class of of pampered apparatchiks who live in DC and the wealthiest three counties in the US. Romney’s so deep in the bubble that he can’t imagine why people wouldn’t give their all to support his faction inside Panem, the capital district, where nobody ever gets indicted, though some might get exiled back to their home district if they run afoul of the city’s rules. Judging by the city’s response, both from the political class and the leeches in the media who live by catering to the political class, Trump is the biggest threat Panem has ever faced, a crass outsider who thinks they should all be in jail. Tulsi Gabbard seems to agree.
Panem’s rulers thinks they can stop the revolt by offering the workers in the subjugated districts more entertainment and a bigger bread ration, because that’s always worked in the past. Will that work again this time? We’ll find out.Report
Heh, such a joker you are George. Trump is more like the opposite of an enterprising individual in that he’d bring the various elements of making a business together, do an absolute shit job and them make everyone involved worse off in the end. He’d defraud his contractors and employees, default on his creditors and even managed to screw up his own brand and reputation. If he’d put the cash his dad left him into a basic interest bearing instrument when he inherited he’d be much richer than he is now and wouldn’t have to run off to Germany or Russia to find people dumb enough to give him a loan.
Your Panem analogy works a bit for the Republicans but not well at all for the Democratic Party. The Dems are corporate, unlovable and have plenty of faults but from the elites on down to the ground pounders they generally are inclined in the same direction as their voters. The GOP; the elites of the party and their voters want opposite things. The GOP elite squared the circle for years by peddling social conservatism and by insisting that the Democrats were worse. Only the latter is working now which is why we have Trump tearing the rights ideological edifice to feces covered shreds.
As for Romney? Well he and Obama didn’t agree on much beyond decorum. Obama was not in favor of cutting safety nets and taxes running up the deficit and giving the money to the wealthy whereas Romney was defined by it.Report
The ultra wealthy did great under Obama, especially if they were in his circle so they got huge government green energy contracts. How many multi-millionaires and billionaires can you name who said anything derogatory about Obama, aside from Donald Trump?
Democrat politicians like to say they’re for the working class, but that expired shortly after they started getting invited to the right parties and the right mansions. Few of them have every met anyone who grew up not just in a trailer park, and most have never even seen a trailer park except on The Weather Channel’s tornado coverage.
What’s happened is that the Democrats focused on distancing themselves from their roots, conjuring up class distinctions to establish their moral and intellectual superiority. They try to simultaneously dismiss Republicans as backwards hicks and international capitalists, some kind of elite trailer trash.
Among other glaring contradictions, this has inevitably led to their current pitch, “Why are you too stupid to vote for us, you despicable mouth-breathing morons?” We’ll see how well that message is received.
Romeny’s message wasn’t much different. “What you morons should realize is that fiscal conservatism and trans-national trade will make us all better off, or at least it will make my friends better off.”Report
Ron Howard voice:
Actually, Hillary won the working class vote.Report
Hee hee don’t ruin it Chip, he’s on a roll!Report
She didn’t even win among white women.
By “working class” I suppose you include all those union people in the Screen Actors Guild.
What’s double amusing is that the Democrats brag that Trump handily won among the uneducated rubes who lack college degrees, and especially those with no college at all, because those people are stupid. Then they turn around and claim they represent the working class.Report
And its the vote of white people that count the most in your world, isn’t it? Everybody else doesn’t really count that much.Report
A “worker” is defined as a white Midwestern guy in a hard hat.
A Latina home health care aid, Hispanic farm worker, black film grip, or trans coder aren’t real workers.
This would be amusing snark, except it reflects the actual worldview of conservatives, where these people are not only not Real Workers, they aren’t even Real Americans, worthy of the same dignity and rights and respect the white guy in a hard hat gets.
These are the internal enemies of fascism, the Unpeople whose existence is illegitimate.Report
So, In Flagrante Delecto?Report
Not sure this is very shocking.
The one reasonably high level politician I know keeps a pseudonymous facebook account for family and friends contact. As a female left wing politician in right wing Alberta, the amount of violent threats she gets is horrifying. Probably slightly less now that she’s in opposition instead of government. She should be able to put up pictures of her family vacation somewhere that the griefers, yellow vests, and nouns of Odin won’t come across them.Report
This is so twitter that it hurts. How utterly inconsequential and yet so very big in the twitterverse. Exhibit #1,000,000 of how twitter reflects nothing but twitter.Report
This is silly. Romney is allowed to have an anonymous Twitter account. Furthermore, unless he posted outrageous things from that account, it should have remained anonymous.Report