I Did This

There’s a Twitter account that started drawing Trump as a five-year-old kid showing off his finger paintings. A cat. A dinosaur. A house. Just scrawls, barely recognizable, each one captioned I did this. That was the entire joke. No hidden layer, no punchline underneath. It was just true.

Early 2017 had this particular flavor of absurdity where each day outdid the last. New scandals, new executive orders, moments where you’d think it couldn’t get more incompetent and then it did. People were protesting, making art, trying to make sense of it. But the Trump Draws account sidestepped the anger and the analysis and did something weirder—it showed you what was happening without needing to yell about it or explain it.

What made it work was how completely it matched reality. You didn’t need outrage when you had accuracy. A man who thought he was doing great things but couldn’t articulate why. A child proud of his drawings. Someone with the confidence of a toddler and the power of a nation, and nothing about that made sense, so why bother pretending it did.

I don’t know if that’s what the account intended, but it didn’t matter. The simplicity of it—the refusal to dress it up as anything more complicated than it was—made the absurdity more visible than any serious analysis could. It just reduced everything to its actual scale: a guy with a child’s ego, wielding power he didn’t comprehend.