【Lena Paul - The Next Morning】

Happy 2018,Lena Paul - The Next Morning things are already shaping up to be one of the weirdest years on record.

Twitter is a convenient way for top officials like Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell to keep in touch with their constituents and the American public. Usually these tweets (with the exception of Donald Trump) are relatively tame. Sometimes, they drive home points, or start battles with other leaders, sometimes, they're creepy GIFs.

Things got super strange on Twitter on Wednesday when the official campaign account for McConnell tweeted out a GIF of McConnell doing his very best impression of a human attempting to smile. The GIF was from a campaign ad for McConnell a few years back, which quickly became a meme.

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The tweet contained no other context, just the GIF, leaving the rest of Twitter to try to make sense of the whole thing.

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Because the GIF had zero context, it's hard to say exactly why the campaign team, which speaks for McConnell, would tweet such a weird image. Many speculated that the forced smile was in reaction to other weird news from today. In case you missed it, President Donald Trump had a very public breakup with his ex-chief strategist and former campaign executive Steve Bannon.

To many, it gave Mitch plenty of reason to smile.

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Earlier on Tuesday, an excerpt from author Michael Wolff's upcoming book Fire and Fury, posted in New York Magazine,revealed that Mitch McConnell and Speaker Paul Ryan had lobbied for Reince Priebus to be Trump's chief of staff, instead of Bannon.

Bowing to pressure, Trump floated the idea of giving the job to Steve Bannon, only to have the notion soundly ridiculed. Murdoch told Trump that Bannon would be a dangerous choice. Joe Scarborough, the former congressman and co-host of ­MSNBC’s Morning Joe, told the president-elect that “Washington will go up in flames” if Bannon became chief of staff.

So Trump turned to Reince Priebus, the RNC chairman, who had became the subject of intense lobbying by House Speaker Paul Ryan and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell. If congressional leaders were going to have to deal with an alien like Donald Trump, then best they do it with the help of one of their own kind.

The whole thing is a promotion for Wolff's upcoming book, which was obtained by The Guardian. The outlet revealed that Bannon also called Donald Trump Jr.'s meeting with the Russians in 2016 "treasonous."

In response to that, Trump released a very intense statement bashing Bannon, even going as far as to say he "lost his mind."

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Shortly after that, McConnell's team sent out the contextless GIF.

Sure, other political leaders have used web culture to deliver messages, but this one is a little different. If this GIF is in response to the drama unfolding between Bannon and the White House, McConnell's team is essentially saying "fuck you, I won" to Bannon. And they're doing it on Twitter for all to see.

We expect this type of behavior from Trump, but McConnell? The internet is truly corrupting the United States political system, and we're all watching it go down in real time.