You have probably noticed the various messages congratulating Donald Trump on winning the election. While I understand why it’s important for President Obama to invite him to the White House for a smooth transition of power, I find tweets like this one from Jeff Bezos highly disturbing:
https://twitter.com/JeffBezos/status/796729498075099136
What purpose does it serve other than obsequious pandering? And then this post from Microsoft:
As a company, Microsoft joins many others in congratulating President-elect Donald J. Trump and Vice President-elect Mike Pence.
After the racist, sexist, bankrupt and dangerous campaign Trump waged? You’ve got to be kidding me. We are better than this. We don’t owe this man any congratulations for his behavior and lies. Now is a time for resistance, not falling in behind this Trump train headed off a cliff.
So I got morbidly curious to see who else is saying congratulations to Trump in Twitter. Who are these people so I can make sure I never support them again in my life?
I collected 321,720 tweets from the past two days that mention congratulations and @realDonaldTrump. I then took a pass through the data and extracted the tweet URL, number of retweets and number of followers for tweets from verified users.
You can see the resulting table in this Google Sheet. I also put the code and tweet identifiers up on GitHub if you want to work with the data yourself.
The 321,720 tweets and retweets reduce down to 444 original tweets from verified users. Go ahead, try sorting the table by the number of retweets and number of followers. Keep a garbage pail handy nearby to throw up in.
Here are some of the top retweeted congratulations, they are a mixture of the predictable and the bizarre:
https://twitter.com/RealBenCarson/status/796258404046094336https://twitter.com/seanhannity/status/796265968913842176https://twitter.com/IsraeliPM/status/796373426260713472https://twitter.com/Gurmeetramrahim/status/796291461553631232https://twitter.com/narendramodi/status/796270728068743169https://twitter.com/Nigel_Farage/status/796257437175025664https://twitter.com/GOP/status/796256394173382657https://twitter.com/KellyannePolls/status/796329128525963264https://twitter.com/Alwaleed_Talal/status/796341367106637828
And here are some of the top retweeted:
https://twitter.com/piersmorgan/status/796256713183784963https://twitter.com/PaulKagame/status/796319573368774657https://twitter.com/kirstiealley/status/796256825318309888https://twitter.com/larry_kudlow/status/796274582831460353https://twitter.com/GeraldoRivera/status/796346294717546496https://twitter.com/rhowardbrowne/status/796245349807570944https://twitter.com/GovernorPataki/status/796352640829521921
I could keep going, but really what’s the point. Sometimes silence is better.