Why does the Secretary of State employ a social media troll?
Here are some of the most bizarre tweets from Rob Nichols' "apolitical" Twitter account.
UPDATE (8/15): After deleting his Twitter account hours after the publishing of this dispatch, Rob Nichols is no longer employed with the Secretary of State’s office:
One of the many reasons I don’t believe that Secretary of State Frank LaRose will ever be a United States Senator representing Ohio is that he surrounds himself with unprofessional yes-men who behave like clowns.
Today, we’ll focus on Rob Nichols, the spokesperson for LaRose, while his boss is working as the Secretary of State and not gallivanting around Ohio in a futile hope to earn the Republican nomination for Senate.
I didn’t know it at the time, but I first encountered Nichols on June 13th at the Statehouse, when I crashed the Ohio Ballot Board meeting in an attempt to get Frank LaRose on the record about various things, including that time he made a lynching joke in his high school yearbook.
Though I waited respectfully for LaRose to have his time with the press corp, he lingered in the hallway until Nichols could obstruct a doorway and (try to) stop me from getting to his boss.
It didn’t go well for him!
See that guy in the blue shirt on the right, who looks like he’s watching a dog shit on an expensive area rug in his living room? That’s our boy Nichols! He got his start in politics by being the son of Judge Robert D. Nichols, a longtime Republican judge in Madison County who retired in 2013 after 43 years on the bench.
When I learned Nichols’ identity, I sent him the following email, which is probably my favorite that I’ve ever sent in this line of work:
Hit the weights, gremlin!
Mr. Nichols –
I don’t care if you think I am not the press. I am a resident of Ohio and therefore entitled to question elected officials on Statehouse grounds. It’s not my fault your boss can’t handle the heat.
You’re also lucky I don’t file battery charges on your ass for your sad little stunt. You impede my work again, and I won’t be so generous.
Until next time,
DJ Byrnes
Nichols also convinced LaRose to postpone his ceremonial vote for Issue 1 on last week’s Special Election Day after I posted his press release (complete with phone number) to Twitter.
It led to this photo that should haunt the self-described “battle-tested” LaRose for the rest of his life:
Hard time for LaRose, the first Green Beret ever punked by ten people holding signs while standing on the sidewalk across the street from his polling location.
We all know what happened next as LaRose’s pet project went down in flames in front of the entire state. I thought that would mean a mental break from having to ponder the existence of LaRose and Nichols, but I was wrong.
It turns out that Nichols, who, again, is the spokesman for the Secretary of State, has a psuedoanonymous Twitter account that he uses to harass politically active people, like friend of The Rooster, Katy Shanahan, the former director of All On The Line Ohio, the group dedicated to ending gerrymandering in the state:
Notice that, a week before the Special Election his boss rammed down our throat, Nichols was browsing Twitter at 1:49 a.m. on a Tuesday demanding to know who pays a private citizen exercising their First Amendment rights on Twitter.
That wasn’t his only tweet at Shanahan, who, again, was only exercising her rights in voicing her displeasure at his boss. But the ostensibly “apolitical” Twitter account also offers insight into the type of mind that LaRose keeps in his inner circle.
Rob Nichols suffers from a terminal case of suburbanite brain
A mere 48 hours after Issue 1 went down, Nichols again did some late-night tweeting to attack Columbus Mayor Andy Ginther at 12:31 a.m. on August 11th.
I’ve pilloried Mayor Suburbs throughout my time writing The Rooster. And unless he resigns in disgrace later today, I will likely continue to do so.
But what’s funny about Mayor Suburbs’ relentless subservience to the police is that it’s never good enough for right-wing freaks like Nichols. That somehow, Mayor Suburbs is also responsible for the crime that he paid the Columbus Department of Police $340 million to handle! They genuinely act like he’s a Maoist dedicated to defunding the local police department—if only he were that cool!
But it’s galling to see this stuff from Nichols, who isn’t even a resident of Columbus. He lives in Upper Arlington precisely because, like most right-wingers, he’s terrified of living in an urban environment and being regularly reminded of people making less than $40,000 a year.
It’s also galling because—and the police will tell you this—the spread of firearms, particularly handguns, are the primary driver of violence in Columbus. And Nichols’ boss has done nothing to stop the stem of gun violence in this state throughout his political career. He has consistently pushed easy and cheap access to the types of weapons routinely used to commission crimes in Ohio.
But somehow, in Nichols’ mind, this is the fault of our dumbass mayor, who only wants to take handouts from developers and play golf.
Rob Nichols is a DeSantis dead-ender
I saw Ron DeSantis speak in a sweaty convention center near Youngstown in 2022. He read off prepared notes and used phrases like “biomedical security state.” It was then I realized that the man didn’t have enough honkey hog mentality to ever topple a master at his craft like President Business Deals.
I wrote that DeSantis would never be president in August 2022. And as he’s campaigned for president, his polling has crashed as Republican voters have realized the guy is a stone-cold freak who can’t even gladhand with children without shaming them for their sugar consumption.
I could have saved Nichols a lot of heartbreak if he had the common sense to read The Rooster. Instead, he’s going to watch in horror as Trump cakewalks to the 2024 presidential nomination and, in the process, throws a rally in Ohio in which he ends Frank LaRose’s political career by calling the decorated Green Beret a “beady-eyed RINO” who won his military accolades in an illegal war in Iraq, not a “real war” like World War II.
Oh well, that’s what Nichols and LaRose deserve after cultivating the Republican Party that made the rise of someone like Trump almost a certainty.
Rob Nichols doesn’t understand that long lines are voter suppression
Ohio Republicans limit the number of early voting centers by county to one. This means that Franklin County (population: 1.3 million) has the same number of early voting centers as Vinton County (population 11,000).
This creates long lines in the urban cores of Ohio, where primarily Democratic voters reside.
Nichols knows that most people just want to show up to vote. Requesting absentee ballots are nice and all, but it’s a process that most people don’t want to mess with.
The job of the Secretary of State should be making voting as easy as convenient for voters, which in Ohio would mean a place like Franklin County would have at least four early voting centers.
But Nichols understands that as voting access goes up, Republican leverage goes down. So all you get is this patronizing tripe to a voter who doesn’t even know it’s coming from someone in the Secretary of State’s inner circle.
Again, Rob Nichols hates when you disrespect his boss online
Here’s Nichols attacking a politically active voter for having the audacity of not being born at the height of the Cold War. Usually, you would want young people to be engaged in our political process, but Nichols can’t help himself to attack a young man for the high crime of telling people to vote against his boss’ pet project on Twitter.
Rob Nichols doesn’t understand Antisemitism, thinks anti-Cathoclism is a thing in 2023
Whether Ohio Republicans like it or not, constantly citing a Holocaust survivor as a billionaire boogeyman funding all our country’s problems is a form of antisemitism, even if it’s coming from the Catholic church.
Soros had nothing to do with Issue 1.
Here, Nichols tries to pin somebody for using an “anti-Catholic dog whistle” like it’s 1923, and people are using “Papists” as a pejorative.
Rob Nichols exudes “divorced dad energy”
Here, at 11:30 a.m. on a Friday, right in the middle of what normal people consider “the work day,” Nichols gets triggered into responding to a video of a guy in a Disney costume informing a woman that he doesn’t enjoy being groped while working.
In Nichols’ mind, the man is “an idiot” for not allowing a woman to make sexual advances in a theme park built for families and their children. It’s one of those times where somebody only needs a few words to offer searing insight into their minds.
Here is another incidence of Nichols getting triggered by a man enjoying a lovely night at the movies with his wife! In Nichols’ worldview, the husband should “surrender his man card” because he took a photograph of his wife outside of the theater where they both saw a movie that grossed over $1.8 billion at the box office in the last month.
Rob Nichols would know a lot about his ideals being uniformly rejected by everyone else around you
It’s rich that this comment came almost a month before the Issue 1 election that LaRose hilariously decided to make the face of his Senate campaign launch.
Somehow, in Nichols’ mind, correctly pointing out that Attorney Dave Yost is a shameless opportunist is “losing” and having your ideals “uniformly rejected by everyone around you.”
Little did he know that a train of reckoning was coming right down the tracks.
Rob Nichols is unfit for his position.
If I were the press secretary for the Secretary of State, I would simply not tweet. Nothing good can come from being in that position and reflexively sharing your inane, stream-of-conscious thoughts.
Because Nichols’ behavior on social media would get him fired in the private sector for not even having the decency to ensure that his “apolitical” troll account was entirely anonymous.
But it’s telling that LaRose employs Nichols in a position that’s supposed to present the politician in the most glowing light possible when Nichols is the type of guy who spends his off-time trolling political activists when most working people are in bed because they have to be at work early in the morning.
It shows LaRose isn’t interested in professionalism or talent when he hires people. He wants yes-men that he can trust, which is fine when you’re a small business tyrant but makes things difficult if you’re trying to balance one full-time job with running for the United States Senate.
Still, Nichols is yet another example of how high a mediocre white man can climb in Ohio politics if his father is a well-connected GOP judge.
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If you aren't press no one is. I wonder what's it take to get and maintain a press credential. I would assume a job at one of our prestigious oligarch-owned media outlets.