Ron Wyden Is Celebrating President Trump’s Bad Week With Clap Emojis

You know who's enjoying President Donald Trump's absurdly bad week of headlines? U.S. Sen. Ron Wyden.

The senior U.S. senator from Oregon took to social media on Tuesday to gloat over the one-two punch of legal disasters for the president: Fraud convictions for Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort, and a guilty plea by the president's former attorney and fixer, Michael Cohen.

Cohen also testified that Trump instructed him to break campaign finance laws by paying off two women who had slept with Trump, in order to influence the 2016 presidential election. (Today, to make matters worse, National Enquirer publisher David Pecker—who allegedly quashed tabloid tales of Trump's sexcapades—was granted immunity by federal prosecutors.)

Wyden was gleeful:

"Follow the money" has been Wyden's mantra for more than a year. Last summer, he told WW his strategy for investigating the Trump campaign: "What I can tell you is that I'm especially interested in matters relating to money laundering, illicit transfers, property transfers, shell corporations. I can't get into what I think the documents might say."

None of this week's setbacks for the president are directly tied to Russian efforts to influence the 2016 election—Wyden's overarching obsession—but they implicate the president in illegal efforts to change the election results with cash.

Given how much of contemporary social media is run by brand-savvy interns, WW wondered: Did Wyden type the clap emojis himself?

He did, says spokesman Henry Stern.

"He's been using claps," says Stern, "since a staffer showed him on world emoji day in 2015!"