The Troll in Office: A Taxonomy
A field guide to elected officials who mistake their feed for their job
Ramin Farahmandpur
There was a time when the worst thing an elected official could do on social media was post an unflattering selfie or misspell a constituent’s name. Those days are behind us. We have entered an era in which some officeholders have discovered that governance is less important than the performance of governance, and that the performance is most effective when it borrows the tactics of the online troll.
I am not talking about elected officials who are rude or blunt or who hold unpopular positions. Democratic life may require all of that at various moments. And I am not talking about insurgent politics. There are times when comfortable institutional norms deserve to be disrupted, when the polite consensus needs someone willing to challenge it. What I am describing is not disruption in the service of the public. It is instead the weaponization of the democratic process for personal brand management by the systematic use of social media to collapse deliberation into spectacle. It substitutes moral posturing for the slow work of coalition-building and treats fellow public servants and constituents as content rather than colleagues.
I have identified seven behaviors, drawn from observation of how elected officials across the country conduct themselves online. I name no one. Readers who follow local politics in any American city will recognize the patterns immediately. That is the point. The troll in office is not an aberration. It is becoming a type.
1. The Purity Audit
The troll in office appoints itself the moral timekeeper. The concern is not whether someone holds the right view. It is whether they held it before it was safe to say so. Suppose you arrived late to a position, which tells the troll everything they need to know about your character, your courage, and your fitness to serve. They are watching the clock, and they want you to know it.
This is an anti-democratic instinct disguised as moral seriousness. Democratic politics depends on persuasion, which means it depends on people changing their minds. A political culture that punishes converts, that treats the timeline of someone’s moral evolution as disqualifying, is a culture that has given up on persuasion altogether. It is also a culture that rewards people who emerge on the scene with opinions already factory-installed.
2. The Binary Frame
Complex institutional questions that involve competing legal frameworks, overlapping jurisdictions, and honest disagreements about strategy are flattened into moral ultimatums. You are either with the community or against it. You either support the proposal, or you are complicit in the problem it addresses. There is no third option, no room for complexity, no acknowledgment that two people who share the same values might reasonably disagree about tactics.
The binary frame is the troll’s most effective weapon because it makes deliberation itself look like cowardice. Anyone who pauses to consider tradeoffs, who asks about implementation, who raises a procedural concern, is not being thoughtful. They must be on the other side. This is how you turn a legislative body into a courtroom.
3. The Asymmetric Attack
The troll in office believes in accountability, but only in one direction. They will publish the names of colleagues who took a certain vote or accepted a certain endorsement, framing the list as “transparency.” They will relay what someone said in a closed-door meeting, presenting it as evidence of bad faith. They will describe an adversary in enough detail that insiders know exactly who is being discussed while withholding the name. A “well-connected figure” who “worked behind the scenes” to sabotage them. A “senior official” who revealed their true priorities in a private meeting. The details are always specific enough to be unmistakable, vague enough to be deniable.
Responding means naming yourself as the person described, which confirms the accusation in the public mind. Staying silent lets the story harden into fact. Meanwhile, the troll’s own strategic calculations, coalition negotiations, and behind-the-scenes maneuvering remain comfortably off the record. Accountability for thee, discretion for me.
4. Weaponized Foresight
In Greek tragedy, Cassandra was cursed to see the future and never be believed. It was a punishment. The troll in office claims the same curse but inverts it: they were not believed, events proved them right, and now the audience owes them not pity but admiration. Cassandra wept. The troll takes a bow.
Tragedy, for the troll in office, has a curious way of arriving as personal validation. When events confirm a position they held, the emphasis falls not on the gravity of what has occurred but on the fact that they called it. The worse things get, the more right they were. The suffering of others becomes a supporting character in the story of their own moral foresight.
Saying “I warned you” is a fair political claim. Weaponized foresight is different: it folds every escalation, every new crisis, into a story whose protagonist is not the person affected but the person who saw it coming. And the foresight eventually extends backward through history. The troll situates itself within a lineage of figures punished for telling the truth. The specific figures vary, but the structure is always the same: great moral leaders were opposed by the powerful, and ‘I am opposed by the powerful; my opposition is evidence of my greatness.’ If you place yourself in the company of prophets and martyrs, then your critics are cast as the forces that have always stood against progress. This forecloses not just debate but the very possibility of honest disagreement.
5. Tactical Vulnerability
In the morning, the troll in office posts about the emotional toll of public life. They describe insomnia, dread, and the weight of carrying other people’s pain. By afternoon, they are firing off jokes about their opponents, celebrating their own swagger, and reveling in the loyalty of their base. By evening, they are posting inspirational quotes about courage in the face of power.
Call it emotional range if you want. I call it tactical deployment. Vulnerability secures sympathy and inoculates against criticism. Who would go after someone who just told you they are barely holding it together? Bravado secures loyalty and establishes dominance. The toggle between them is so rapid that the audience never settles into a stable relationship with the speaker. They are always off-balance, which is exactly where the troll wants them.
6. The Backlash Engine
Oscar Wilde observed that the only thing worse than being talked about is not being talked about. He meant it as wit. The troll in office has adopted it as a governing philosophy.
When a critic hurls an insult at the troll in office, the response is not outrage but performance. The insult is screenshot, reposted, and celebrated. They joke about printing it on a shirt. The message to the audience is clear: hatred from the right people is itself a credential.
The instinct is not entirely wrong. Public figures do get attacked unfairly, and refusing to be wounded by it is a form of resilience. But the troll in office goes further. They convert every attack into content, every critic into an audience-building opportunity. The cycle is self-reinforcing: provoke, absorb the backlash, and repackage it as proof of your importance. Governance becomes indistinguishable from “engagement farming.”
7. The Governance-as-Content Pipeline
When someone accuses the troll in office of spending too much time performing for cameras, they list their legislative accomplishments. Fair enough. But the deeper move is subtler. The accusation itself becomes content. The defense becomes content. The list of accomplishments becomes content. Every criticism, every policy win, every personal slight, every late-night emotional post.
The distinction between doing the work and performing the work vanishes inside this pipeline. The troll in office may be passing legislation, but the legislation exists primarily in public presentations as evidence of the troll’s effectiveness. Not as interventions in people’s lives that require sustained attention, implementation, and revision. The policy is born, announced, defended against critics, and then abandoned to the feed as the next cycle begins.
I have spent my career studying how institutions function and how they fail. Institutions fail through corruption, through inertia, through capture by narrow interests. They also fail when the people inside them stop treating the institution as a site of collective deliberation and start treating it as a platform for individual performance.
The troll in office does not believe they are undermining democratic governance. They believe they are the only ones practicing it honestly. The troll is certain that their righteousness is what the institution needs most, and that anyone who asks them to slow down, listen, compromise, or extend good faith to a colleague is asking them to betray the people they represent.
But democratic governance is not content. It is not a feed. It is not a brand. It is the unglamorous process of sitting in rooms with people you may at times disagree with and finding outcomes tolerable enough to continue the work. The troll in office has no patience for this process because it does not generate content featuring the troll as hero.
The rest of us are left to wonder what happens when the feed runs out of things to say, and the institution that was supposed to outlast all of us has been hollowed out from the inside by people who were too busy performing governance to govern.