Trolls work through abstraction, leveraging the internet and irony to carve out a space between actions and consequences. Becoming president has blown Trump’s cover: There’s nothing more consequential than this. Trolls are typically outsiders, and sad ones: They don’t fit into the dominant group, so they terrorize it from the sidelines. Part of what makes Trump’s administration so alarming is that the troll sensibility now dominates. And when that happens, it’s reminiscent of what Sartre described: No reason, no principle, just the pure exercise of power.
Amanda Hess, “Click Bait”, The New York Times Magazine (5 March 2017), 13.