Mitch McConnell’s Twitter just lost a flame war with ‘Big Little Lies’ star Adam Scott

By Joe Berkowitz

Being Mitch McConnell’s social media strategist must be a tough gig.

Not only do you have to wade through a constant maelstrom of tweets calling your guy a turtle, you also have to find ways to make the Senate Majority Leader not seem like a Southern-fried supervillain. Even given the impossibility of the task at hand, however, whoever’s in charge of the shop over there keeps dropping the ball.

First, there was the tone-deaf Cocaine Mitch merch, and now the account is in a flame war with Big Little Lies star Adam Scott. (And losing.)

One lie that’s too historically consequential to be a big little one is that the reason McConnell held a vacant seat open on Obama’s Supreme Court in 2016 was so the voters could decide who should fill it. In case it wasn’t clear in 2016 that this was an obvious lie, McConnell clarified recently what would happen if a SCOTUS seat opened in 2020 before the election. (“Oh, we’d fill it,” he said.)

When President Donald Trump echoed McConnell’s remarks on Wednesday, McConnell’s Twitter team marked the occasion with a saucy GIF from a popular TV show. It turns out they did not choose wisely, though.

The winking gentleman meant to be an avatar of McConnell’s ain’t-I-a-stinker duplicity is Adam Scott in a scene from the much-mourned local politics sitcom Parks and Recreation. In response, Scott, who seldom shies away from venting his opinions about the current administration online, firmly told McConnell and co. to find some other way for the Senate Majority Leader to brag about abusing power.

The average political social media strategist might have just taken their lumps on this one and gone back to pretending that most people in the entertainment industry tend to find their boss despicable.

Not this one, though.

Instead, the brain geniuses at McConnell HQ fired back at Adam Scott with the kind of gentle quasi-roast that might come up in a more neutral interaction. This person tweeted a reference to the most shameful moment in the life and career of Scott’s character on Parks and Rec. How lighthearted! A little shift in tone to let the celebrity know that Mitch McConnell’s tweet-jockey has a fun side, too.

Scott didn’t exactly see it that way, though, and instead responded with what would be perhaps one of the more shameful moments in McConnell’s life and career, were he even a little bit capable of shame.

Let this be a lesson to Team Mitch: If you’re going to do a cute tweet about your boss’s apocalyptically hypocritical ways, maybe use a GIF of Scott Baio or James Woods or one of the three other show-business people who might not object. If this person were half as good at tweeting as McConnell is at terminally imperiling democracy, we would not be having this conversation.

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