Trump’s Social Media Mess in Texas

The Forrest Four-Cast: October 31, 2016

That Hillary Clinton is within a few points of taking Texas on Tuesday, November 8 represents just one more of the many bizarre twists and turns of the 2016 presidential election. Yet whether or not the state turns blue, Lone Star residents have already done their fair / un-fair share in facilitating the disaster that is Donald Trump.

Leading the Lone Star State’s race to the bottom is the anti-Semite Alex Jones from Austin. For better or for worse, Trump’s continued ascension has led to even more publicity for someone who already has much too much. Learn more about Jones’ misguided beliefs via recent stories in Vox, Spin, Tablet, Slate, and the Austin American-Statesman.

But Austin’s contributions to the Trump campaign are equally matched by those of the Alamo City just 90 miles south of us. There lives Brad Parscale a marketing professional described by the San Antonio Current as a “political newbie who won Trump’s love after building some web pages for the family’s businesses and charities over the past several years. [He] reportedly started working on the Trump-for-president team even before Mr. Orange officially announced his run. This summer, Parscale emerged as the Trump campaign’s digital director–a feat that in and of itself seems notable when you consider how many top campaign personnel Trump jettisoned from his team during his rise to the GOP presidential nomination.” As noted in an October 27 Bloomberg profile, the voice of Parscale and the voice of the angry candidate have now become essentially the same: “[He] is one of the few within Trump’s crew entrusted to tweet on his behalf.”

The ever-independent spirit that typifies Texas helps to breed some of the world’s sharpest, most creative and most innovative thinkers. This non-conformist spirit also produces its fair share of crackpots and nut-jobs. Let’s hope that the delicate balance between reasonable and unreasonable re-establishes itself post November.