Web Original / Trump Leaks

"Oh, yeah, I'm a monster, I thought I made that clear."

— Donald Trump

Trump Leaks is a collected series of Tweets made by Owen Ellickson, detailing the (fake) secret communications of the Donald Trump presidential campaign. The basic idea is to try explaining the insane events coming out of the Trump campaign, because it's not like it makes sense to anyone else.

Various major political figures make appearances, including Donald Trump himself, Speaker of the House Paul Ryan, New Jersey Governor Chris "Hole" Christie, Fox News Founder and (Ex-)CEO Roger Ailes, and many more.

The tweets have been collected into (thus far) four Storify threads. You can find them here: Part One, Part Two, Part Three, and Part Four.

---

Tropes that appear in this work include:

• Achievements in Ignorance: Trump winning the Republican nomination itself, managing to get in the running for the highest office in the land despite a dearth of political experience, credibility, or competence.
• Alas, Poor Villain: After spending a rather significant amount of time using Kelly Anne Conway as his host, Roger Ailes is finally rejected by her and beat to death with a clipboard.
• Arc Words: "The Age of Man is over. It is the Fire's turn, now."
• Bad Is Good and Good Is Bad: Seems to be how Trump views things. For example, he hates that Mike Pence seems so bland, until he finds out Pence did stuff like sign a law that forced women to hold funerals for their miscarriages.
  Trump: There's something broken inside you and I respect that.
• Beleaguered Assistant: Almost everyone who works under Donald Trump qualifies, but special attention must be given to Chris "Hole" Christie and campaign manager Kelly Anne Conway.
  • Mike Pence may also count, even though he doesn't directly serve under Trump.
• Big Applesauce: Trump is a native of Queens, and tends to bring a lot of New Yorker-isms along with him. The same goes for the former mayor of New York, Rudy Giuliani.
• Big Eater: Steve Bannon, who is almost always depicted eating some kind of junk food.
• Black Comedy: Very much so, and made all the darker because it's (partly) based on true events.
• Brown Note: The Ailesong, the maddening melody anyone who hosts Roger Ailes hears, which tells them how to hasten the end of days.
• Brutal Honesty: Subverted. While Trump lies with impunity, he believes he's always telling the truth- or is, at least, able to convince himself that he's being honest in the moment. When he is honest, however, it is almost always brutally so.
• Bunny-Ears Lawyer: Subverted. While the Trump campaign has the "eccentric" part of this trope down flat, they struggle a lot with the "competence" element.
• Bystander Syndrome: Deliberately invoke by John Boener, the former Speaker of the House, who is quite happily living in retirement while Trump becomes everyone else's problem. In fact, he regularly speaks to the current Speaker, Paul Ryan, to either advise Ryan on how to deal with Trump, or to brag about how great life is outside of politics.
• Cast Full of Crazy: Anyone who doesn't start out nuts eventually becomes that way from prolonged exposure to Trump.
• Cloud Cuckoolander: Trump seems to have a very different idea of what constitutes good politics, compared to most people. If he ever says the phrase "tweeted it," expect Stunned Silence from anyone in earshot.
  • Many of his subordinates/surrogates also qualify, for various reasons.
    • Ben Carson seems heavily sedated most of the time, and is primarily concerned with selling his merch.
    • Rudy Giuliani is so hyped up on Trump fever that he actually claimed there were no terrorist attacks by Islamic extremists in the US prior to the Obama Administration. And for the record, he was mayor of New York on September 11th, 2001. Also, he was once caught yelling at a pear.
    • General Flynn has gone full General Ripper, and actually had to be talked down during one of Trump's security briefings.^note This is both true in Real Life, and in the "security briefings" at Sbarro's in the Trump Leaks world.
    • Julian Assange, besides having a very inflated view of himself, speaks in all caps and has let Roger Stone run Wiki Leaks while he's hiding from prosecution for multiple rape charges.
• Corrupt Corporate Executive: Roger Ailes, obviously, but Steve Bannon and Paul Manafort also qualify.
• The Cracker: Julian Assange, head of Wiki Leaks and apparent go-between for the Trump Campaign and Russia's intelligence agencies.
• Dead Baby Comedy: With literal dead babies, when it comes to the Zika crisis.
• Deadpan Snarker: While everyone gets their shots in, the two biggest contenders are Hillary Clinton (who never misses an opportunity to mock her opponent) and John Boener (who's just glad that Trump isn't his problem).
• Deal with the Devil: Paul Ryan seems to treat his alliance with Trump this way, and one that was forced upon him by the primary process to boot.
• Disproportionate Retribution: Trump does not handle humiliation well. As an example, he discovered that there was one person alive who had witnessed him being unable to swim. To keep this fact from the public, Trump ordered "Hole" to assassinate him.
• Eldritch Abomination: Roger Ailes, who, when not inside a host, takes the form of an "inside out squid" covered in teeth. He speaks only in bizarre sound effects, and heralds the end of the Age of Man. Donald Trump goes to him for advice on debate prep and campaign strategy.
• Embarrassing Nickname: Trump almost never refers to Chris Christie as anything other than "Hole," and at one point has him legally change his name to that, just because it's funny.
  • Ironically, Trump himself gets this later on, as Kelly Anne Conway grows more and more jaded- eventually, she refuses to refer to Trump as anything other than "it."
• For the Evulz: A major motivator behind Trump's actions, along with his ego issues. Also the primary motivation of Roger Ailes.
• Funetik Aksent: Used for Melania Trump, Rudy Giuliani and, to an extent, Julian Assange (who capitalizes every word, for whatever reason).
• General Ripper: General Tommy Flynn, who sat in with Trump on his "security briefings."^note Lunches at Sbarro's with R. Lee Ermey.
• Humiliation Conga: Trump Leaks are basically one long, self-inflicted Humiliation Conga for Trump and anyone else unfortunate enough to be associated with him.
• Hunting the Most Dangerous Game: Ann Coulter gets angry after Trump betrays her by switching his position on immigration (the day her pro-Trump hagiography came out, no less), and demands she bring him someone to hunt. Of course, the person he offers up is Hole, who Trump admits he'll miss having around to abuse.
  • Unfortunately for Ann, Christie realizes something suspicious is going on and manages to get out. So how does Trump fix the situation? He sends Roger Ailes instead.
    • And this, temporarily, results in Ann Coulter becoming Roger Ailes' host.
• Implausible Deniability: Donald Trump can, and will, lie about almost anything, even if you have the video evidence to prove it.
  • When asked about his health after refusing to release his medical records, he said his "left arm checked out good." Now, compare this to how Paul Ryan and Ben Carson referred to his physical:
  Carson: avg human is 0.15% sodium. donald is 9%
  Ryan: Jesus Christ.
  Carson: he has a condition i've decided to call "mcdonald's elbow"
• It's All About Me: Is it really that surprising that a man who puts his name in giant gold letters on all of his buildings might have a big ego?
• Jerkass Has a Point: Trump manages to have occasional flashes of brilliance, almost always things that drive others to despair or madness.
  • For example: he loves reminding Paul Ryan that, however awful Trump may seem, he was the one chosen in the Republican Primary, by a plurality of the party's voters. Horrifying as that may be to Ryan, Trump voters are Republican voters.
• Jerk Jock: Many of Trump's behaviors are basically this, put in the body of a 70-year old man.
• Narcissist: Trump is basically incapable of showing compassion or empathy, or even faking basic sympathy for the plight of others. The closest he's ever come is sadness at the idea of sending Chris Christie to get killed by Ann Coulter, and even that comes across more like he had to flush his goldfish down the toilet.
• The Mole: Chris "Hole" Christie, unsurprisingly, starts leaking info to the Clinton campaign, in the hopes that she can rescue him from the fallout of the Trump campaign.
• Monster Clown: In 2016, there happened to be a rash of people dressing up as evil clowns, trying to scare people. As it turns out, this was supposed to be a part of Trump's campaign strategy.
  Conway: We have one field office in Florida but fifty states' worth of clown gangs.
  Ryan: What are they for?
  Conway: He just says "the end."
  • And they're led by Guggo, King of Clowns, who becomes a recurring character throughout the "series."
• Morally Ambiguous Doctorate: Dr. Harold Bornstein, who is this crossed with Dr. Feelgood.
  • Averted with Ben Carson. He's a perfectly capable neurosurgeon, he's just a bit spacy and more concerned with selling merchandise than anything else.
• Never My Fault: Trump is the most obvious carrier of this trait, but most people on the campaign also suffer from this issue. The end result is that, despite constant screw ups, no one ever takes any responsibility.
• No Indoor Voice: R. Lee Ermey, who is brought in to do Trump's "classified CIA briefings."^note Actually just Chris Christie driving Trump down to a Sbarro's to have random facts shouted at him.

Trump: Ailes came to you. I guess your Zika games clinched it: you're on the team.

Ryan: I'm not like you.

Trump: Dark beast says different!

• Proud to Be a Geek: Paul Ryan is very sad to see the end of Grimm.
• Puppeteer Parasite: Roger Ailes can take possession of any person, or any reasonably intact dead body, and control it through unknown means.
• Reasonable Authority Figure: Paul Ryan tries to be this, but finds himself unable to contain Trump's wild behavior.
  • He's also not as reasonable as he appears. Although it's hard not to feel bad for him basically being forced to support someone he can't stand, he is still the kind of person who willingly associates with white supremacists, and once killed a bill to fund Zika research by inserting a provision that would defund Planned Parenthood.
• The Sociopath: Almost everyone on the Trump Campaign, with the exception of Kelly Ann Conway, comes across like this.
• Starfish Language: Roger Ailes, whenever he's not in a host. People can still generally understand him, however.
• Strange-Syntax Speaker: Aside from the characters written with a Funetik Aksent, there are also those who have a consistently odd "speaking" style.
  • ben carson is always written with all lower case sentences
  • Julian Assange Always Speaks With All Of His Words Capitalized Like Proper Nouns!!!
  • R. LEE ERMEY ONLY TALKS IN ALL CAPS!
  • Guggo thehahaha Clown King ishaaHAHAHAhaha always laughahahahaing
• Straw Misogynist: Between his sexist comments, his bragging about sexually assaulting women, and the growing number of women who have accused him of sexually assaulting them, Trump fits into this category in Real Life. When exaggerated in Trump Leaks, he becomes a full-on He-Man Woman Hater.
  • Many of his subordinates and surrogates, particularly Roger Ailes, Steve Bannon, Rudy Giuliani and Newt Gingrich, all fall into this category as well.
• Stunned Silence: A common reaction to anything Donald Trump says or does.
  • Managed to cause six straight lines of Stunned Silence after the infamous 3 AM tweets about Alicia Machado.
• Those Wacky Nazis: Trump has a distressing number of incredibly loyal "alt-right" followers, who are, if not actually Nazis, then at least sympathetic to the white supremacist cause. Or, as Trump calls them, "my precious little frogs."
• Too Dumb to Live: Or Too Dumb To Run a Successful Campaign, in any event.
• Truth in Television: Way too many of the ridiculous things that happen in Trump Leaks are based off of Real Life events.
• Villain Protagonist: Although essentially the protagonist of the tweets, Trump is not portrayed sympathetically, generally speaking.