We've all been dealing with Donald Trump's face filling our timelines and newsfeeds on the daily since he kicked off his presidential campaign by calling Mexicans rapists. And there's no end in sight for the next four years.
Thankfully, a bunch of programmers have been busy creating browser extensions and add-ons to help us maintain our mental health, ranging from replacing Trump's face with kittens to fact-checking his tweets on the fly to removing the world's new orange overlord from the Internet altogether.
This Chrome extension, created by coder and tech journalist Tom Royal, "replaces images of Donald Trump with kittens, because seriously, f*** that guy."
It was initially made back in February when, as he writes in the FAQ, "Trump was merely an annoyance; a particularly vile and shouty cartoon clown making a nuisance of himself ahead of the Republican primaries when, I hoped, he'd get knocked back to his career of real estate fuckery and reality TV bellowing."
Royal has since expanded the extension's reach to also block pics of VP-elect Mike Pence, Brexit champion Nigel Farage of the UK Independence Party, French xenophobe Marine Le Pen of Le Front National and Dutch far-right Party for Freedom founder Geert Wilders.
But while the extension is a tremendous idea, even its maker admits that "we're looking down the barrel of four years of horror. No Chrome extension's going to fix that, sadly."
Trump recently announced that rather than moving over to @POTUS, he plans to keep tweeting from his 20 million followers-strong @realDonaldTrump account. Well, that will save some coding effort for the Washington Post.
Last month, the newspaper launched RealDonaldContext, an app for Chrome and Firefox that addresses the fact that "his tweets aren't always entirely accurate, by mistake or by design." So the Post's Fix team decided to "ensure that the public receives the most accurate possible information by creating this extension, which will add more context or corrections to things that Trump tweets."
This live fact-checking may take a few minutes to update Trump's tweets but will try to prevent the president from sending out fake news to his millions of followers.
Trump, of course, is only the embodiment of what Van Jones famously dubbed a "whitelash" which has been building for some time. The right-wing push back against civil rights initially targeted what they dubbed "political correctness," so in 2015, New Zealand developer Byron C Clark created PC2Respect, dubbing it a "software-as-social-commentary app."
Much like the kitten one, it searches through website code and changes the term "political correctness" to a more accurate descriptor — "treating people with respect."
The idea was inspired by a 2013 quote from cult novelist Neil Gaiman, who blogged:
"I was reading a book (about interjections, oddly enough) yesterday which included the phrase 'In these days of political correctness…' talking about no longer making jokes that denigrated people for their culture or for the colour of their skin. And I thought, 'That’s not actually anything to do with 'political correctness'....I started imagining a world in which we replaced the phrase 'politically correct' wherever we could with 'treating other people with respect,' and it made me smile."
It was later updated to change "politically correct" to "respectful" and "politically incorrect" to "disrespectful."
Trump has been famously insecure about his hand size since 1988 when current Vanity Fair editor Graydon Carter described him in Spy magazine as a "short-fingered vulgarian."
Carter addressed the issue in the fall of 2015, noting that he did it "just to drive him a little bit crazy" because "like so many bullies, Trump has skin of gossamer."
Given that it still drives him crazy enough to address it in a Republican debate, while also incredibly defending his penis from hand size innuendo, he'd probably hate the Internet automating that insult. That's exactly why Dan Sinker, who became infamous a few years back for antagonizing Chicago mayor Rahm Emmanuel with a fake Twitter account, developed it.
But what if the tiny hands thing just isn't insulting enough for you? Enter Detrumpify, an extension created by Tools of Our Tools and available for Firefox and Chrome, which replaces Trump's name with a random selection of more creative insults.
While initially using Jezebel originals like "Sentient Hate-Balloon," "Neo-Fascist Real Estate Golem" and "New Superfood Made of Finely-Ground Clown Wigs" from this collection, "because of our national tragedy, I will continue to add new insulting names as I come across them, at least four more years."
Maybe none of these are enough for you. Maybe it's not about replacing his photo, fact-checking or insulting him. Maybe you sometimes need a Trump-free Internet. The Trump Filter has you covered.
This Chrome extension identifies parts of a web page about Donald Trump and "erase them from the Internet," offering three filter levels based on your mood and how much you want to avoid Trump news. It was initially created as "part of the antidote for this toxic candidacy [because] the only way to deflate Trump's political star is through suffocation."
That obviously didn't work. But now that he's been elected, the Trump Filter can function as a from of self-care.
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