The Year of the Political Troll

Did Donald Trump usher in the new wave of political trolling, or is he an early-warning system, a canary, tweeting madly?Photograph by Mark Peterson / Redux

For Democrats who have relished the spectacle of Republican infighting, this is an uncomfortable time. On Saturday, the Nevada Democratic Party convention descended into chaos after sixty-four potential Bernie Sanders delegates were deemed ineligible. Some Sanders supporters reportedly tossed chairs, booed the speakers, and vowed to disrupt efforts to award Hillary Clinton the nomination. Clinton backers, such as Stephanie Schriock, the president of EMILY’s List, called it “straight out of the Donald Trump playbook.” Nina Turner, a Sanders surrogate, told the Times that some of his supporters are planning civil disobedience and an effort to contest the nomination at the Democratic National Convention, in Philadelphia. If Democrats believe “that that’s not going to happen, they are just sadly mistaken,” Turner said. “They have blinders on.”

Amid the drama, Roberta Lange, the Nevada Democratic Party chairwoman, received a wave of text messages and voice mails of a kind that is an increasingly routine accompaniment to public life: “Praying to god someone shoots you in the FACE”; "Hey bitch, loved how you broke the system, we know where you live, where you work, where you eat, where your kids go to school. . . . You made a bad choice, prepare for hell, calls won't stop." (In a statement, Sanders condemned “any and all forms of violence, including the personal harassment of individuals.”) Every Presidential cycle bequeaths a vocabulary; in 2008, it was Obama’s “Hope”; in 2012, Romney’s “forty-seven per cent.” But 2016 may be best captured by its formatting: the first ALL-CAPS campaign, when American Internet trolls announced, anonymously, that they are no longer content to cower in the comments section.

It’s tempting to lay this development at the feet of Donald Trump, so much so that even Rush Limbaugh, who knows something of the subject, has compared Trump to an Internet troll. Trump has, indeed, made a powerful case that he is the Thomas Edison of trolling, our greatest serial entrepreneur of low-grade sadism, by tormenting his peers and setting alight whatever taboos lingered in American politics. Trump also skipped between social media (the natural home of the troll) and more traditional venues. Who else found time, between sessions of torturing former Governor Jeb Bush on the debate stage, to buy JebBush.com and redirect it to his own Web site? Trump recognized earlier than most politicians that bullying addles people of his own station, in large part because victimhood is an unfamiliar experience for them. Exceptions may exist, but on the whole such people didn’t get where they are in life by being bullied. When Trump taunted Marlene Ricketts, the matriarch of a family of wealthy Republican donors, her son Tom said, “It’s a little surreal when Donald Trump threatens your mom.”

But did Trump really usher in the new wave of political trolling, or is he, rather, an early-warning system, a canary, tweeting madly, in this case, flashing his yellow plumage? Could he be doing us all a service by alerting us to something toxic brewing beneath? What are the lesser-known trolls trying to say, and why?

Anna Merlan, a senior reporter at Jezebel and a Sanders supporter, called nine of the people who’d sent Lange insulting or threatening texts; she reached three of them. The most interesting was the author of “We know where you live, where you work, where you eat.” He had a Wisconsin area code and described himself as a twenty-six-year-old named Ethan. (Merlan wrote that she assumed it was a fake name.) He was, he said, playing a role, inspired by Anonymous, the hacker collective. “I created a character, a scary—kind of a Jason kind of character,” he told Merlan. “Looking at what the establishment is afraid of, a scary Joker-like character who’s like the boogeyman under their bed.”

Merlan told Ethan that his actions could hurt their chosen candidate. “I understand where you’re coming from,” he replied. “But people are getting frustrated, and I only have three hundred dollars to my name.” Ethan said he had “bad disabilities,” and was unable to work. “I heard people tell me I’m lazy, I’m useless. I can’t even go to college.” The threats were “a warning,” he said. “People get so frustrated. They’ll find out where some of these people live, and it’ll be a huge bloody revolt. You need to listen before it turns into that.” In the background, an older woman asked, worriedly, “Who are you talking to?” And then Ethan was gone.

It’s easy to picture Ethan, marooned somewhere in Wisconsin with, presumably, his mom or grandmother, as irrelevant, part of a tiny minority. That would be a mistake. “Nearly half of Americans would have trouble finding four hundred dollars to pay for an emergency,” Neal Gabler reported in an essay in The Atlantic this month. Gabler is a writer with a long and distinguished career, and yet, he writes, “I know what it is like to be down to my last $5—literally—while I wait for a paycheck to arrive, and I know what it is like to subsist for days on a diet of eggs.” Gabler’s eloquence is, in a sense, a rebuttal to the bile of the trolls, but his sophistication should be only modest comfort. There are more Ethans than Neals.

Occasionally, a troll gets out of himself, and the results are revealing. In 2013, Lindy West, a comedy writer, who had written an article arguing that** **male comedians were careless with the subject of rape, was inundated with threats of rape and other reader feedback. One of the worst was not a threat but, as she recalled on “This American Life,” “a message on Twitter from my dead dad.” A guy had found her father’s obituary, created a spoof account, and so on. She was wounded, and, months later, she wrote about it. And then, to her astonishment, the troll apologized. “I don't know why or even when I started trolling you,” he wrote, in an e-mail. “I think my anger towards you stems from your happiness with your own being. It offended me because it served to highlight my unhappiness with my own self.” She called him, and the results are one of the most memorable pieces of radio you will ever hear.

In the end, West said, “It's frightening to discover that he's so normal. He has female co-workers who enjoy his company. He has a real, live girlfriend who loves him. They have no idea that he used to go online and traumatize women for fun.” She vowed, in encounters with trolls, “not to lose sight of their humanity the way that they lost sight of mine.”

It’s a generous conclusion, if not a reassuring one. Forgiveness alone will not address the spirit of casual violence that has infected our politics, and forgiveness is possible only after the fact. What if the darker passions given free rein by this campaign are not the culmination of something but, rather, the beginning?