If that employee can delete the account, could that employee put out fake tweets in the president’s name?
What would have happened if that departing employee had decided to Tweet out a message like “LAUNCH THE NUKES!!!” under the president’s name? No, that would not have begun the process of launching America’s nuclear arsenal, but it is easy to imagine an immediate panic. The North Korean regime might very well launch a military strike in an attempt to pre-empt an American attack.
In other words, Twitter has gained an enormous power over public discourse, and it’s still effectively controlled by people with the maturity and sense of responsibility of disgruntled teenage fast-food workers.
General Mattis, Stand Up to Trump or He’ll Drag You Down
He even seemed to explain how the president’s phone call to the widow of a Green Beret killed in Niger got garbled.
.. Trump needs to know that it is now your way or the highway — not his. That is how you talk to a bully. It’s the only language he understands.Tell him: No more
- ridiculous tweeting attacks on people every morning; no more
- telling senators who forge bipartisan compromises on immigration or health care that he’s with them one day and against them the next; no more
- casual lying; no more
- feeding the base white supremacist “red meat” — no more
- distracting us from the real work of forging compromises for the American people and no more
- eroding the American creed.
.. if you can’t together force Trump onto an agenda of national healing and progress, then you should together tell him that he can govern with his kids and Sanders — because you took an oath to defend the Constitution, not to wipe up Trump’s daily filth with the uniform three of you wore so honorably.
Feud Between Trump, Corker Escalates
Tennessee senator says the president should stay out of negotiations over tax plan, prompting Twitter rebuke
Mr. Corker, a Tennessee Republican, said the president should stay out of negotiations over the tax-overhaul effort. Mr. Corker has played a key role in the tax bill so far, cutting a crucial deal with Sen. Pat Toomey (R., Pa.) on the Senate’s budget, allowing for up to $1.5 trillion in tax cuts over a decade.
.. “I would just like him to leave it to the professionals for a while, and see if we can do something that’s constructive,” Mr. Corker said ..
Mr. Trump responded .. where he called Mr. Corker a “lightweight,” referred to him as “liddle’ Bob Corker,” said the two-term senator “couldn’t get elected dog catcher.”
.. “I think that he’s proven himself unable to rise to the occasion. I think many of us, me included, have tried to…I’ve intervened, I’ve had private dinner. I’ve been with him on multiple occasions to try to create some kind of aspirational approach, if you will, to the way that he conducts himself. But I don’t think that that’s possible, and he’s obviously not going to rise to the occasion as president.”
.. Many Republicans now believe coming up short on a tax-code rewrite would cost them control of the House majority, and Mr. Corker’s comments risk undermining it.
Trump May Be Following Palin’s Trajectory
Support for her cooled due to antic statements, intellectual thinness and general strangeness.
The president has been understandably confident in his supporters. They appreciate his efforts, admire his accomplishments (Justice Neil Gorsuch, ISIS’ setbacks), claim bragging rights for possibly related occurrences (the stock market’s rise), and feel sympathy for him as an outsider up against the swamp. They see his roughness as evidence of his authenticity, so he doesn’t freak them out every day. In this they are like Sarah Palin’s supporters, who saw her lack of intellectual polish as proof of sincerity. At her height, in 2008, she had almost the entire Republican Party behind her, and was pushed forward most forcefully by those who went on to lead Never Trump. But in time she lost her place through antic statements, intellectual thinness and general strangeness.
The same may well happen—or be happening—with Donald Trump.
One reason is that there is no hard constituency in America for political incompetence, and that is what he continues to demonstrate.
He proceeds each day with the confidence of one who thinks his foundation firm when it’s not—it’s shaky. His job is to build support, win people over through persuasion, and score some legislative victories that will encourage a public sense that he is competent, even talented. The story of this presidency so far is his inability to do this. He thwarts himself daily with his dramas. In the thwarting he does something unusual: He gives his own supporters no cover. They back him at some personal cost, in workplace conversations and at family gatherings... He acts as if he takes them for granted. He does not dance with the ones that brung him.
.. Soon after, Mr. Trump called Myeshia Johnson, widow of Army sergeant La David T. Johnson, and reached her in the car on the way to receive her husband’s casket. Someone put the call on speakerphone. A Democratic congresswoman in the car later charged that Trump had been disrespectful. In fairness, if the congresswoman quoted him accurately, it is quite possible that “He knew what he was signing up for” meant, in the president’s mind, “He heroically signed up to put his life on the line for his country,”
.. Mr. Kelly, in a remarkable White House briefing Thursday, recounted what Gen. Joseph Dunford, now chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, had told then-Gen. Kelly in 2010, when Robert died: “He was doing exactly what he wanted to do. . . . He knew what he was getting into by joining that 1%. He knew what the possibilities were, because we were at war.”
.. It was unfortunate that when the controversy erupted, the president defaulted to anger, and tweets. News stories were illustrated everywhere by the picture of the beautiful young widow sobbing as she leaned on her husband’s flag-draped casket. Those are the real stakes and that is the real story, not some jerky sideshow about which presidents called which grieving families more often.
.. This week Sen. John McCain famously gave a speech in Philadelphia slamming the administration’s foreign-policy philosophy as a “half-baked, spurious nationalism cooked up by people who would rather find scapegoats than solve problems.”
.. There are many ways presidents can respond to such criticism—thoughtfully, with wit or an incisive rejoinder.Mr. Trump went on Chris Plante’s radio show to tell Sen. McCain he’d better watch it. “People have to be careful because at some point I fight back,” he said. “I’m being very nice. I’m being very, very nice. But at some point I fight back, and it won’t be pretty.”
.. FDR, Teddy Roosevelt and Ronald Reagan were pretty tough hombres, but they always managed to sound like presidents and not, say, John Gotti.
.. Mr. McCain, suffering from cancer, evoked in his reply his experience as a prisoner of war: “I’ve faced far greater challenges than this.”
That, actually, is how presidents talk.
.. I get a lot of mail saying this is all about style—people pick on Mr. Trump because he isn’t smooth, doesn’t say the right words. “But we understand him.” “Get over these antiquated ideas of public dignity, we’re long past that.” But the problem is not style. A gruff, awkward, inelegant style wedded to maturity and seriousness of purpose would be powerful in America. Mr. Trump’s problem has to do with something deeper—showing forbearance, patience, sympathy; revealing the human qualities people appreciate seeing in a political leader because they suggest a reliable inner stature.
.. the president absolutely has to win on tax reform after his embarrassing loss on ObamaCare. He shouldn’t be in this position, with his back to the wall.
.. Mr. Trump should keep his eye on Sarah Palin’s social media profile. She has 1.4 million Twitter followers, and herFacebook page has a “Shop Now” button.