The Daily Fuckup

Donald Trump’s latest filing in his legal fight with Twitter offers a familiar Trump-world spectacle: a courtroom argument built on the notion that he should still receive some of the privileges of the presidency even though he no longer holds the office. On September 23, 2021, his lawyers asked a federal court to set aside Twitter’s forum-selection clause, claiming that it should not control his case because, at the time relevant to his use of the platform, he was acting as the 45th president of the United States. That is not a small procedural point. Forum-selection clauses are standard contract language, and they exist for a reason: they tell people where disputes have to be filed, reducing venue fights and keeping litigation from wandering all over the map. Trump’s legal team is trying to reach around that ordinary rule by arguing that his relationship with Twitter was somehow unique because of who he was and what he was doing on the platform. The result is a filing that reads less like a routine procedural objection and more like an attempt to keep a former officeholder wrapped in the legal aura of the office itself.

The basic theory is easy enough to state and hard to take seriously without a raised eyebrow. Trump’s lawyers appear to be saying that because he was president when he used Twitter, the company’s ordinary terms of service should not bind him in the same way they would bind anyone else. In practical terms, that means a private citizen is asking a court to treat a past presidential title as a kind of ongoing legal exemption. The logic is striking because it tries to convert a political fact into a lasting procedural advantage. It also stretches well beyond the usual rules courts rely on when deciding whether a contract provision should be enforced. Judges generally prefer arguments that can be applied in a predictable way, not ones that depend on granting special status to a litigant because he once occupied the Oval Office. The filing may be meant to frame Trump’s Twitter use as something more official than personal, but the asking price is unusually high: a court would have to accept that the presidency somehow follows the man after the term ends whenever that would help him sidestep an agreement.

That is where the argument starts to look less like a narrow venue dispute and more like a continuation of Trump’s broader habit of blurring the line between the office and the individual. Since leaving the White House, he has repeatedly acted as though the powers, protections, and public deference associated with the presidency can be detached from the job and used as needed in later battles. Politically, that may still be a useful posture. In court, however, it can look like a refusal to accept that he is now just a litigant like any other, even when he is suing over conduct involving a private company and a private contract. The filing seems to rely on the idea that the old title still carries some kind of special force, and that assumption is exactly what makes the brief so vulnerable to skepticism. Courts are not usually impressed by symbolism when the question is whether a term of service applies. They tend to care about what the agreement says, how it functions, and whether there is a legally sound reason to disregard it. Trump’s side may believe it has one, but the version presented here leans heavily on status, not doctrine.

None of this guarantees how the judge will ultimately rule, and it would be premature to pretend otherwise. Procedural disputes are often messy, and parties can make aggressive arguments for tactical reasons even when they know the odds are uncertain. Still, the filing stands out because it so plainly invites the obvious objection: if a former president can invoke the office to escape contractual rules that he accepted, where does that principle stop? If presidential status can override a forum-selection clause in a private dispute, could it also be used to dodge other terms, other obligations, or other ordinary legal limits whenever convenient? Those are the kinds of questions a court would have to think through, and they are not questions that become easier just because the litigant is famous or once held high office. The more the brief depends on treating presidential identity like a permanent shield, the more it exposes the fragility of the underlying strategy. That is why the filing has the feel of a forum-fight flop in the making: it tries to turn a routine contract issue into a grand constitutional-style exception, but the argument is so overreaching that it risks undercutting itself the moment a judge reads it closely. In the end, the episode says as much about Trump’s post-presidency legal style as it does about this one case. The instinct remains the same: insist that the old title still delivers new powers, even when the law is asking for something much more ordinary and much less theatrical.