What originated as a casual discussion months ago in The Daily Show writers' room came to fruition over the weekend in New York City. On Friday, Comedy Central's long-running satirical newscast and talk show unveiled "The Donald J. Trump Presidential Twitter Library" at 3 West 57th Street in Midwtown Manhattan--only about 150 paces down the block from Trump Tower.
A Daily Show tweet touting the opening last week read, "This weekend only! Aside from the nuclear fallout, these tweets will be Trump's most lasting legacy." The pop-up exhibit was free and open to the public, and Deadline reported over the weekend that long lines prompted the show to extend visiting hours to accommodate demand from a public eager to relive a smorgasbord of the president's most astounding tweets.
The gallery installation mimicked a bonafide museum aesthetic by lining the walls with framed tweets, including a rarefied gilded collection meant to highlight Trump's greatest hits, like this, this and this. Classics all, and the introductory wall briefed attendees on the museum's mission to "explore the history, science and art of Trump's tweets - from his earliest attempts to put stubby fingers to phone to his emergence as our era's preeminent social media revolutionary."
Other quirks of the exhibit featured an entryway sculpture of a pair of teensy orange hands cradling a smartphone, a Trump nickname generator, and--what one of the show's executive producers called "the crown jewel of the library"--a mock Oval Office where visitors can tweet from a golden toilet while clad in a bathrobe and Trump wig.
Trump's 140-character-or-less digital musings have skyrocketed from a measly 56 tweets in 2009 to a flabbergasting 9,182 in 2015. At the library, his real time tweets were heralded by a red emergency light and a looped alarm of the president repeating "Bing, bing... Bing, bing."
"Say what you want about Donald Trump," said The Daily Show host Trevor Noah at a special sneak preview for the press. "He may not be good at presidenting, or reading or geopolitics, but he is a damn fine Twitterer--probably the best that ever lived."
As the exhibit attests, the president's tweets are almost always a source of ridicule and revulsion for the over 65 million Americans who voted the other way in 2016. But to his adherents, they are everyday proof that the man refuses to be thwarted by the Beltway culture of "politics as usual" from "Making America Great Again."
But apart from the heavy doses of black comedy, alt-right Kool-Aid and the robust potential for angering foreign governments the world-over, at least we can rest assured his antsy fingertips can't play God with the markets. A survey from the Financial Times published earlier this year showed a negligible impact on the share prices of companies who were the subject of a Trump tweet.
Meanwhile, The Daily Show's stock seems to have hit an all-time high in the post-Jon Stewart era, as the Los Angeles Times reports that Noah and company are already discussing the idea of bringing Trump's tweets to a city near you.
