Member-only story
‘I Am Not Sad. I Am Really Not Sad’: Trump’s Twitter Reply-Guys Reckon With a Post-Trump Era
What happens when your archnemesis is gone?
Most mornings for the past five years, 62-year-old Jeffrey Guterman has woken up in his Florida home, made coffee in his kitchen, and sat down at his computer to tweet out taunts to the president.
“You excreted on democracy,” he wrote recently.
“You are lower than slime,” read another sharp-witted missive.
But that beloved morning ritual ended on January 8, when Twitter suspended Donald Trump’s account — effectively nuking not only the president’s 56,000 tweets, but the platform on which a generation of quick-twitch reply-guys built their names and audiences.
Say what you will about Trump’s reply-guys, a well-known (if much-ridiculed) breed. Since the earliest days of Trump’s campaign, a devoted retinue of both critics and fans have fought to respond first to the president’s every tweet — a manic endeavor requiring, at minimum, a good Wi-Fi connection, a lot of free time, and some patience for caps-locked rants and misspellings.
Many of Trump’s early reply-guys eventually burned out or changed tactics; others have long since been booted from Twitter themselves. But dozens of otherwise…
