“A Republic, if you can keep it.”
* It should be alarming and embarrassing that the president of the U.S. should be called out to delete tweets. Twitter, which Trump uses as a bullhorn to his 80 million followers, recently attached fact-checked disclaimers to Trump tweets about vote-by-mail fraud. “Disclaimers” is a polite word for targeting self-serving misinformation and pathological lying. BTW, Trump wasn’t the only world leader to be targeted by Twitter. It actually removed tweets by Brazil’s President Jair Bolsonaro and Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro over their touting of false COVID cures and ignoring social distancing orders. No, it’s never a good sign when an American president is referenced, all too appropriately, in the context of authoritarian leaders.
“Our election process will become badly tainted and a laughingstock all over the world,” noted Trump in his fact-check-warning-induced tweet. How ironic. An election process, which has already yielded a Trump presidency with accompanying collateral national and global damage, has already tainted America. As for “laughingstock,” here’s hoping the last laugh belongs to an American electorate that is finally so appalled by the Trump base’s channeling of the Oval Office version of the Rev. Jim Jones that it rallies enthusiastically and existentially around the Democratic nominee and (hopefully) relegates the Trump years to historic-anomaly status.
* Trump retribution hit a new, subterranean low with his tweets that spread a baseless claim that MSNBC host Joe Scarborough murdered a staff member in 2001. That’s just not disproportional payback for on-air criticism or hardball political rhetoric, it’s defamation and should have serious consequences–even if social media companies are still, inexplicably, exempt from libel laws that apply to other publishers.
* “Market up BIG, DOW crosses 25,000. S&P 500 over 3000. States should open up ASAP. The Transition to Greatness has started, ahead of schedule.” Yes that was the populist-in-chief underscoring that the stock market–hardly a synonym for the economy–is the measure of his presidency and “greatness.”
* Trump’s gut issue with the GOP Convention in Charlotte this summer is not one of serious pandemic priorities, but how it will affect his coronation show. He wants his live, prime-time, rubber-stamp party. The celebrity apprentice-in-chief needs a center-stage presence with a full-capacity love-in of MAGA-hatted sycophants. His business, lest we forget, is still show business. Image trumps public safety. Anything that smacks of virtual convening is antithetical to a narcissist’s needs.
* Sarah Huckabee Sanders and Kayleigh McEnany: Joseph Goebbels would be embarrassed.
* “… Any difficulty and we will assume (military) control but, when the looting starts, the shooting starts.” That was Trump’s inimitable, tit-for-tat tweet of reassurance to Democratic Gov. Tim Walz of Minnesota after violent protests broke out over the killing of George Floyd .
* Imagine America’s status with China, North Korea, Venezuela, Cuba, the European Community, Russia, Iran, Saudi Arabia, the UN and the WHO, if Trump were not, as he has self-heralded, a superior negotiator.