Alex Thomas
Working under a United States congressman on Capitol Hill can be a grueling job when the river of bills seems never-ending. however, congressional staffers also enjoy plenty of downtime, and on Tuesday, one enterprising government employee decided to spend the earlier half of the day throwing snark on the internet with everybody’s favorite pastime: editing Wikipedia pages.
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An IP address that tracks to Capitol Hill has spent a good part of the day trolling the Trump administration on Wikipedia. We know this because of the Twitter account @congressedits — an automated bot that documents every Wikipedia action originating from the Hill. While it might seem like a silly little algorithm, the bot has shed some light on shifty goings-on in the Capitol — like the time a Senate staffer reworked the Wikipedia article on the Senate’s report on torture.
Tuesday’s troll was a little more benign. He/she started the day by adding Attorney General Jeff Session’s name to the list of Keebler elves. Then, he moved on to throw some shade at former Donald Trump associate Paul Manafort by adding his name to the list of famous cases where white-collar criminals have posted bail (Manafort was indicted Monday on money laundering charges).
A little later, the politically-inclined jokester changed the introductory sentence of Special Council Robert Mueller’s Wikipedia page to read that the former FBI leader is “Donald Trump’s worst nightmare.”
https://twitter.com/congressedits/status/925353423058489346
After toying around with the Trump administration, the troll got darker. At the end of the Wikipedia page for “guillotine,” he wrote, “I’m not saying the retirement of the guillotine was a mistake, but it was a mistake.” After that, he/she must have taken a lunch break; they logged off for an hour but returned with another joke at the expense of the White House, changing the entry for “day care” to read, “Local governments, often municipalities, may operate non-profit day care centers, such as the White House.” The latest barb is a nod to Senator Bob Corker’s (R-Tenn.) remark comparing the White House to a day care center.
