For those thrilled at the prospect of hearing a 73-year-old totter on for more than an hour about his Twitter feed, Donald Trump’s social media summit represented a rare and precious opportunity. On Thursday, very online president rounded up his favorite internet trolls—Diamond and Silk, James O’Keefe, and the like—for a “very big and very important” White House visit wherein they could air their grievances about tech companies’ allegedly unfair and discriminatory treatment.

Democrats, naturally, took issue with some of the most toxic figures on the web milling around the White House. “This has the appearance not of a social media summit but a political rally and call for the right,” Senator Mark Warner told the Washington Post. “The fact that some of the most extreme voices on social media are coming to the White House, and they get a forum to complain about how often they’re retweeted, and that the actual platform companies aren’t even invited, smacks of the absurd.” In practice, however, the event was less a coordinated rallying cry than a disjointed circus, featuring a parade of self-styled provocateur bozos and a near-melee in the Rose Garden.

The event was pretty doomed from the start, boasting the production value of a middle school science fair: the White House printed and displayed on poster board a selection of notable Trump tweets, including the much-memed “covfefe,” and another from 2012 in which the future-president reported that “many are saying I’m the best 140 character writer in the world.” The administration also printed dictionary-style definitions of various words—including a pronunciation guide, in case participants were tripped up by “shadow banning”—that have been thrown out by conservatives to explain Big Tech’s supposed bias against them. Sadly, any scholarly tone staffers had hoped to convey was torpedoed by the predictably aimless Trump address that served as the summit’s centerpiece. It was standard-issue Trump: various superlatives and complaints interspersed with odd strolls down the winding, mossy footpaths of his mind.

“A lot of bad things are happening,” Trump noted between digressions about the 2020 Democrats, his spelling skills, and his hair. “We have terrible bias. We have censorship like nobody has any understanding or nobody can believe...They’re playing with a lot of minds, and they’re playing unfairly.”

Trump, of course, was taking aim at Facebook, Twitter, and Google, companies he’s frequently complained about. Most of his gripes, including a baseless claim that Jack Dorsey is dinging his follower count, are old hat by now, but he did announced that he would be convening a meeting with the heads of the social-media companies in question, something that may have come as a surprise to the companies themselves. When asked by CNN for comment on the supposed rendezvous, a Twitter spokesperson replied that the company “can’t know what we’d do in response to a hypothetical invite to a hypothetical meeting.” Floating the possibility of that meeting was about as close as the summit got to substance. Most of the event was devoted to legitimizing abhorrent online figures like O’Keefe, the producer of heavily-edited videos “exposing” wrongdoing by various liberal-affiliated groups. “Somebody said he’s controversial,” Trump said of the Project Veritas founder. “He’s truthful.”

Given the absurdity of the whole event, it’s only fitting that the summit came to an end with a near-brawl between goateed former Trump aide Sebastian Gorka and Playboy Brian Karem. “And you’re a journalist, right?” Gorka reportedly asked Karem, to which Karem replied, “Come on over here and talk to me, brother. Or we can go outside and have a long conversation.”

“You’re not a journalist,” replied Gorka. “You’re a punk!”

“At least they didn’t spit on me,” Karem later told CNN’s Brian Stelter. “Just another day at the White House.”

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