Let us begin with the leaderboard.
Donald Trump, 45th and 47th President of the United States, Commander in Chief of the most powerful military in human history, keeper of the nuclear codes and the appointment calendar of the free world, would like you to know that he is the number one person on TikTok. Not a top performer. Not popular for a man his age. The number one person, by far, a phrase he supplied himself, unprompted, of his own free will, to an audience that had not asked and would not have thought to ask. “You know who the number one person on TikTok is by far?” he said. “Trump. Me. Taylor Swift was number 11.”
This is, in a vacuum, a minor eccentricity. In the context of the full man, it is load-bearing, and I want to take it apart the way one takes apart a watch that has begun, alarmingly, to run backward.
Begin with the fact that the ranking exists at all. Somewhere inside the man there is a chart, and the chart is maintained, and the chart is consulted, and at the top of the chart, in a position of unquestioned and apparently permanent supremacy, sits himself. This is notable because this is a man who tried to ban TikTok. He signed an order against it. He spent a portion of a presidency attempting to remove the platform from the country entirely, on the stated grounds that it was a menace to the republic, and having failed to abolish it he has instead quietly crowned himself its reigning champion, the way an arsonist might mention, at a dinner party, apropos of nothing, that he holds the house record at the very casino he once attempted to burn down.
Note the scope of the claim. He did not say number one among politicians, which would have been merely grandiose. He did not say number one among men who have served as president, which would at least have been defensible on the grounds that the competition is small and largely deceased. He said number one, full stop, of everyone, on a platform inhabited by something like a billion people, a great many of whom are teenagers who can actually dance, and he said it with the flat administrative confidence of a man reading a figure off a spreadsheet, a spreadsheet that exists nowhere but in the warm and windowless room at the center of his skull.
Then, having established his supremacy, he did the thing that lifts the entire episode out of ordinary delusion and into something closer to art. He named a runner-up.
He did not have to do this. Nobody named a runner-up. There was no runner-up in the room, no runner-up in the question, no runner-up anywhere in the vicinity of the conversation until he reached out into the wider culture, selected the most famous woman alive, and installed her in a losing position directly beneath himself. Taylor Swift, he announced, unbidden. Number eleven.
Consider the number, because the number is the whole thing. He did not say number two, which would have implied a close race, a rival at the shoulder, a threat worth watching. He did not say “and some others,” which would have been safely, forgettably vague. He said number eleven, a figure so oddly and gratuitously specific that it conjures into existence an entire phantom ranking, numbers two through ten, nine unnamed TikTok titans arranged in a tidy descending ladder of also-rans, not one of whom he mentioned, because not one of them was the point. The point was Taylor Swift. The point was that she had lost. And the point, above all, was that she had lost by ten full positions, a margin he manufactured on the spot, in real time, to be large enough to sting.
I have tried, in good faith, to reconstruct the internal sequence, and the closest I can arrive at is this. A man is speaking about something else. A thought arrives, uninvited, that he is popular on TikTok. A second and more ambitious department of the mind receives this thought and stamps it number one. A third department, sensing that number one on its own lacks tension and drama, dispatches a runner to fetch an opponent from the culture at large, and the runner returns, winded, holding Taylor Swift, and a fourth department assigns her the number eleven, because eleven is far enough beneath one to wound and precise enough to sound as though it came from data. All four departments complete their work in the half-second before the sentence leaves his mouth. At no point is reality consulted, because reality does not keep an office in this building.
It is worth noting, purely for the record and in the interest of completeness, that he is not the number one person on TikTok. It is worth noting that there is no “number one person on TikTok” in the sense he means, that no such singular throne exists to be occupied, that the metric he is citing is not a metric anyone anywhere keeps, and that he is therefore reporting his standing in a tournament he has personally convened, entered, refereed, judged, and won, all within the confines of a single subordinate clause.
And Taylor Swift, who was not consulted, who did not enter, who was conscripted into a competition on a platform he tried to outlaw in order to lose a contest that does not exist by a margin he invented, has said nothing. She has said nothing because there is nothing to say. She was not in the race. Nobody was in the race. There is no race. There is a man, at a podium, holding a chart that no one else can see, reading out the standings.
Number one.
By far.
He checked.
“many of whom are teenagers who can actually dance”
“the warm and windowless room at the center of his skull”
“reality does not keep an office in this building”
Excellent.
Any worker who slacks off as much as this loser does would be fired before lunch. He should not have even 10 seconds available to think about his stupid TikTok. Such a child.