TwitterYesterday, the primaries; today, Donald Trump.
Hillary Clinton is on a roll. And we don't mean politically—at least not for these purposes. We're talking about a social media war of words. What went down at 2:27 p.m. on Thursday, June 9 will surely go into the record books of Twitter responses. You can find it filed under holy s--t.
And now for a little backstory. After all, a tweet like this can't be shortchanged.
Earlier today, current president and former 2016 election neutral Barack Obama went on record to officially endorse Hillary Clinton. It wasn't very surprising given what went down in this week's primaries, but it was a big step for Team Hillary nonetheless. He said a lot of nice things about his former Secretary of State, like that she was qualified and has courage and compassion. All in all, it was pretty standard endorsement fare.
And then The Donald jumped into the ring.
Again, this is not shocking. It wouldn't be a day that ended in -day if Trump wasn't wasn't saying something at least halfway shocking. But what had us doing an open-mouthed slow clap was how it all went down. The presumptive Republican nominee took to Twitter to express his disdain for the morning's announcement, saying "Obama just endorsed crooked Hillary. He wants four more years of Obama—but nobody else does!"
Most of America barely lifted an eyebrow at that; it's actually quite tame as far as Donald-isms go. But then, Clinton's account (and we say account because the tweet in question doesn't have the sign off that designates messages that come straight from the candidate) clapped back. With only three words, they managed to shock every single one of their followers. We'll let them speak for themselves:
Bar raised, friends.
This exchange is significant in several ways. For starters, it's certainly not language that we normally see in the political campaign world of circumventing and diplomacy. Trump has said, both verbally and via social media, a veritable boatload of either over-the-top or just plain offensive things, and the Clinton camp has never issued a tweet like this.
It's also worth pointing out that Team Trump took an eerily long time to respond. After approximately two hours, they hit back with a dig at the original dig (are you following here?), as well as an additional dig at the Clinton email scandal.
"How long did it take your team of 823 people to think that up," he wrote. "And where are your 33,000 emails that you deleted?"
Dare we say, there were burns all around.
As the first "official" day of the one-on-one presidential election, it looks like we the public are in for a very long campaign period. Just imagine all the passive aggressive tweets that will be shot back and forth between now and November. That is, if Team Hillary hasn't already realized that these clap-backs can be more trouble than they're worth.
But either, we'll be sitting back with the popcorn watching it all go down.