The Most Expensive Block in History

Valerie Plame—the CIA officer whose covert identity was deliberately leaked to journalists by members of the Bush administration in 2003, in retaliation for her husband’s inconvenient reporting on Iraq’s weapons program—launched a GoFundMe in 2017 to buy Twitter and delete Donald Trump’s account. The target was one billion dollars. She had raised ten thousand.

The math was never going to work, but the premise was correct. Trump’s Twitter feed in 2017 was a live diplomatic incident on any given morning—nuclear posturing at Kim Jong-un, ambient aggression toward NATO allies, 3 a.m. grievances against cable news hosts who’d said something unkind. Twitter declined to remove him despite repeated pressure, because a sitting president generates traffic and traffic generates money, and Twitter needed money badly enough to treat a genuinely destabilizing head of state as a content creator worth protecting. The platform’s argument was essentially: he’s newsworthy. Which was true and also insane.

There’s something darkly right about Plame being the one to try this. She’d already had her career dismantled by a White House that decided political inconvenience outweighed national security. Her answer to the next administration’s Twitter problem was: fine, we’ll just buy the platform. It’s the kind of plan that only sounds completely unreasonable until you sit with it for a few minutes. Ten thousand dollars of the way to a billion is not progress, technically speaking. But picture Trump’s face the morning the account simply wasn’t there anymore. The hands with nowhere to go. It’s a beautiful image even at one percent of one percent funded.