Trump still texts me constantly, like a bad ex-boyfriend

Trump still texts me constantly, like a bad ex-boyfriend

We ignore the former president’s stalking presence at our peril

Former president Donald Trump at a rally in Sarasota, Fla., on July 3. (Octavio Jones/Reuters)

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 By Amanda Uhle

Amanda Uhle is the publisher and executive director of McSweeney's.

Yesterday at 9:04 a.m. EST

A dangerous crackpot texts me several times a day. He’s manipulative. He’s paranoid. He’ll flatter me and then say horrible things about people I admire. He wants me to give him money. I get at least three wheedling texts a day from this ne’er-do-well.

I didn’t sign up for them, but I began to receive updates from Donald Trump’s presidential campaigns because I was attending his rallies as a journalist. I tolerated them at first. After all, I wanted to deeply understand his message and the motivation behind his followers’ fervent support. The first several hundred messages were illuminating: a near-constant stream of self-aggrandizing declarations peppered with insults about his opponents. The bully-style messaging made sense with Trump’s platform, even if I quibbled with the erratic capitalization and the lack of humility.

Then things got weird. Leading up to the 2020 election, the fundraising messaging became not only desperate and nonsensical but way too personal, including pleas from the then-president’s sons and others. Kimberly Guilfoyle: Where have you been? Pres Trump ACTIVATED a 400%-IMPACT with no response? You have 1 MORE HOUR.

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There were critical deadlines, incomplete payments, accusations of fraud, name-calling and outrageous matching gift offers, all addressed quite pointedly to me as a “friend” and “patriot” and all delivered with bloodcurdling urgency, day after day.

Trump’s texts are annoying, bizarre, way too frequent and legally sketchy. They are vital to his communication and finance strategy. So why haven’t I unsubscribed?

Because ignoring Trump now is the most dangerous move we can make.

Unpleasant as it is, I’ve chosen my own way of being vigilant on this front, even as I see lots of fellow liberals luxuriate in the boringness of Joe Biden’s first year as president and the relative calm of opting out of doomscrolling. Trump without his Twitter account or the Resolute Desk is far easier to steer clear of than he was a year ago, but that doesn’t mean we should.

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Twenty-odd years ago I briefly dated a man who seemed great at first. He was a cartoonist who was into bossa nova and foreign films. He made a fine risotto. These charms were short-lived. I caught him in multiple mundane lies and one huge one, and in general, I just didn’t really like how he treated women. When I told him it was over, he wouldn’t accept it, calling me over and over, trying to change my mind. He left pushy voice mails, suggesting I come to my senses and take him back. I once glimpsed his reflection in the wavy glass of an Art Deco mirror as I caught him following several paces behind me in an antique store.

When I stopped answering his calls, then stopped answering my phone altogether, he drove 250 miles to leave a box of chocolates and a João Gilberto record on my doorstep. I remained uninterested and grew increasingly afraid. The phone, a landline, would ring overnight, repeatedly, until my roommate asked why I didn’t just unplug it so we could sleep. I told her that if he was going to call anyway, I felt safer knowing when and how often rather than wondering what he might be plotting behind my back.

Trump, of course, is America’s most loathsome ex-boyfriend. He enacted ineffable damage to our democracy before, during and after his term in office, and yet he is blithely scheduling our next date. He lost the 2020 election. The majority of Americans — and Americans’ electoral college votes — indicated a choice for someone else. We dumped him. The melody of Taylor Swift’s “We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together” should be ringing in his ears, but he’s got Queen’s “We are the Champions” blasting instead, just as he did at the rallies I attended, even though the band doesn’t want him to use its music.

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Last month, a full year after his defeat, I received a text about supposed election fraud. I think nursing a wound like that a year later might be the definition of a red flag. Sure, I can ignore the texts with special offers (“We are saving (1) roll of Trump Gift Wrapping Paper for YOU, friend.”) or laugh off the ones that claim Vice President Harris is TERRIFIED (she’s not). But as much as I want to, I can’t push aside Trump’s looming presence in our lives under the Biden administration.

It sometimes seems as if every person who has dated has a story like this — the deranged dude who doesn’t get it. Pretending he’s not there puts you in the greatest peril. And Trump is there. I might like to imagine that he has permanently retreated to Mar-a-Lago, but he’s actively muzzling congressional witnesses in the Jan. 6 investigation, suggesting 2024 running mates and raising money.

I know enough about fundraising to understand that if it wasn’t working, the texts would cease. Someone is donating each time he asks. Millions of someones are receiving all these unhinged messages, and some of them are nodding in agreement when Trump says, “GREAT NEWS FOR KYLE RITTENHOUSE” or sends a plea to “save elections.” For some Americans, his spell is unbroken, and Trump still holds appeal. I wasn’t one of them, but I bet plenty of people clicked the link under the recent text that asked, “Why haven’t you claimed your Trump Christmas Stocking yet? Do you NOT want to MAKE CHRISTMAS GREAT AGAIN?”

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Every time my finger hovers over the option STOP2END, I reconsider. I could make him vanish from my iPhone, but it would hardly deter him from what he’s trying to do.

One afternoon in 1997, I traded my dignity for safety when I crouched in a mop closet to avoid the cartoonist when he made an unexpected and unwelcome visit to my workplace. Faced with a relentless, menacing creep who wants us back, we Americans could do the same. Hiding does hold a certain comfort.

A few decades on, I’m reluctant to lie low. I’d rather keep my eyes and ears open, alert to danger and ready to face it. I’ve recently tried to reframe the intrusions of these constant texts. Every exhortation to donate should instead remind me to donate to things I believe in, like voting rights. It’s not that I want to receive a hundred loony texts a month, or even that I have no other choice. It’s that every unwanted ding is a reminder to beware, and we need to be.