The pure spirit of Greta Thunberg is the perfect antidote to Donald Trump
She is the opposite to Donald Trump. He is 73 and devotes considerable attn. to his vanity. The workers at his golf resorts have revealed how he wears makeup & has to have fresh shirts brought to him often bc he gets bronzer on the collar. He has this unnatural skin colour with a white ring around his eyes probably bc he tans in tanning beds and wears goggles. He bleaches his hair & brows, and does this elaborate comb over. He wears suits to look impressive even at casual events like baseball games. Greta is 16. She has more important things to do with her time than preen, so she keeps her face clean of makeup, wears her hair in a simple braid. Has met President Obama, PM Justin Trudeau, and spoken before the UN dressed simply, again with no makeup, no hair style.
He has frequent outbursts on Twitter. He wrote more than 100 Tweets in 1 day. But adults like to tsk tsk teens & say we're the ones who spend too much time on social media. He sulked away from the NATO Summit after world leaders low-key mocked him for the spectacles he's made, returning early to the US where he's in the process of being impeached by the House. He aggressively publicly mocked her & she didn't give him the satisfaction of writing a tweet or making a comment in response. She gave him all of like half a minute of her time, just changing her Twitter bio to troll him back brilliantly & efficiently. Then she returned her focus to what matters. Not pettiness on Twitter.
She is the opposite to Donald Trump. He is 73 and devotes considerable attn. to his vanity. The workers at his golf resorts have revealed how he wears makeup & has to have fresh shirts brought to him often bc he gets bronzer on the collar. He has this unnatural skin colour with a white ring around his eyes probably bc he tans in tanning beds and wears goggles. He bleaches his hair & brows, and does this elaborate comb over. He wears suits to look impressive even at casual events like baseball games. Greta is 16. She has more important things to do with her time than preen, so she keeps her face clean of makeup, wears her hair in a simple braid. Has met President Obama, PM Justin Trudeau, and spoken before the UN dressed simply, again with no makeup, no hair style.
He has frequent outbursts on Twitter. He wrote more than 100 Tweets in 1 day. But adults like to tsk tsk teens & say we're the ones who spend too much time on social media. He sulked away from the NATO Summit after world leaders low-key mocked him for the spectacles he's made, returning early to the US where he's in the process of being impeached by the House. He aggressively publicly mocked her & she didn't give him the satisfaction of writing a tweet or making a comment in response. She gave him all of like half a minute of her time, just changing her Twitter bio to troll him back brilliantly & efficiently. Then she returned her focus to what matters. Not pettiness on Twitter.
On Wednesday, Time named Thunberg the magazine’s Person of the Year. Donald Trump, who is famously obsessed with being on the cover of Time, could not stand it. He has campaigned on fossil-fuel expansion, has betrayed on numerous occasions that he does not understand what climate change is, and, on November 4th, he officially began proceedings to remove the U.S. from the Paris Agreement. (Every other country in the world remains a signatory to the pact.) On Thursday, in response to Thunberg’s news, he tweeted: “So ridiculous. Greta must work on her Anger Management problem, then go to a good old fashioned movie with a friend! Chill Greta, Chill!” Thunberg, as always, took the President’s mockery in stride, changing her Twitter bio, minutes later, to “A teenager working on her anger management problem. Currently chilling and watching a good old fashioned movie with a friend.”
This is not the first time that Thunberg has one-upped Trump’s mocking tweets. In September, she gave a historic speech with the kind of rhetorical vigor that exemplifies her gifts as an orator. “This is all wrong,” she said. “I shouldn’t be up here. I should be back in school, on the other side of the ocean. Yet you all come to us young people for hope. How dare you!” Later, Trump retweeted a video clip of her remarks, adding, “She seems like a very happy young girl looking forward to a bright and wonderful future. So nice to see!” The same day, Thunberg put the exact words in her Twitter bio: “A very happy young girl looking forward to a bright and wonderful future.”
Thunberg is Trump’s perfect foil. She is pure spirit, committed to the foremost emergency of our time, to the science behind it, and to the people who are working every day to rapidly change our energy systems and consumption patterns so that we avert climate change’s deadliest impacts and destabilizing tipping points. Thunberg is devoted to learning, writing, and understanding the world around her. She constantly lifts up other young climate leaders—especially those from indigenous and frontline communities—and begs reporters to focus on them, not her. (On Monday, she and Germany’s most prominent youth activist, Luisa Neubauer, hosted a press conference with young leaders from the Marshall Islands, the Philippines, Russia, and Uganda.) She is a gifted public speaker, not because she stirs up chaos and hate through incoherent rants, but because she speaks elegantly and intelligently, in logical, pithy, unmuddied sentences. Her rhetorical gifts are, perhaps, all the more remarkable considering that, when she was younger, she fell into a major depression concerning climate change and stopped speaking altogether for months. As she said at the start of her speech on Tuesday, “A year and a half ago, I didn’t speak to anyone unless I really had to. But then I found a reason to speak.”