The Trump modus operandi is compelling. He deliberately ignores the way things are supposed to be done. He shows up at polite society’s party and starts smashing the nice plates. It’s appalling, but ordinary people are thrilled to bits. Why should their country be tippy-toeing around China all the time? China deserves a poke in the eye!
.. The more that Mr. Trump’s manoeuvres offend the media, the more popular he gets. When he bullied Carrier to keep several hundred jobs in the United States, opinion-leaders of all stripes were dismayed. They warned that the deal could undermine the rule of law and do permanent damage to American capitalism. But working people loved it. Even Democratic voters loved it. They want him to use his power to push businesses around.
.. Mr. Trump is the perfect leader for the Twitter age. The point of Twitter is not to have rational discussions or intelligent exchanges of different points of view. The point of Twitter is to slag your enemies and retweet your friends. The point is to rally your supporters and build a following of millions by confirming their biases and giving them a constant stream of reasons to detest the other side. It’s not just one side that’s guilty of this. All sides are.
.. Whenever he feels there’s someone in the world who might not be paying attention to him, all he needs to do is tweet. The length – 140 characters – is ideally suited to his attention span and to the complexity and depth of his ideas.
.. No need for a sustained argument. The whole idea is to emote and entertain. The greatest social-media communicator of the age turns out to be a 70-year-old orange-haired guy who can’t even use a computer.
The Daily 202: The art of punching down
From a practical political standpoint: Trump doesn’t appear to fully grasp how much he elevates his opponents by attacking them.His criticisms of “Hamilton” might have ginned up his base, but they also meant that way more people heard the statement that the cast read aloud to Mike Pence than would have otherwise. His attack on “Saturday Night Live”last weekend guaranteed that millions more people watched the skit mocking his use of Twitter than would have otherwise.
The truth is that relatively few people actually watch CNN. Very few caught Jones’s interview with Erin Burnett. But every news organization in the country today will cover the back-and-forth and ensure that more voters hear the message that Trump exaggerated how many jobs he saved at Carrier.
The inaccuracies in Donald Trump’s Air Force One tweet
“ … a brand new 747 Air Force One … ”
At a minimum, there would be two Air Force Ones. You need a spare in case there is a problem with one. The jets generally have a life cycle of 30 years.
.. Air Force One needs to be designed to survive a nuclear war. It requires all sorts of undisclosed security upgrades and countermeasures. It can refuel in flight. The actual cost of the plane will depend on the equipment that goes into it. There also needs to be extensive testing, probably lasting two years, before the plane is deemed ready for presidential travel.
.. The Boeing 757 jet used by the secretary of state was supposed to get long-range engines but at the last moment, they were killed by then-Sen. Ted Stevens (R-Alaska). This resulted in some cost savings — and also that the secretary of state would always have to refuel in Alaska on flights to and from Asia.
..Boeing says it made no money making the last set of Air Force One jets and does not expect to make money on this order, as it is more a matter of prestige... Todd Harrison, a defense budget expert at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, said “the program is very new and hardly had a chance to get started yet.” So, in effect, there are no real cost overruns yet. He added that the estimated $4 billion cost is reasonable given the requirements of the project.
How to Know What Donald Trump Really Cares About: Look at What He’s Insulting
First, Mr. Trump likes to identify a couple of chief enemies and attack them until they are no longer threatening enough to interest him. He hurls insults at these foils relentlessly, for sustained periods – weeks or months. Jeb Bush, Marco Rubio, Ted Cruz and Hillary Clinton have all held Mr. Trump’s attention in this way; nearly one in every three insults in the last two years has been directed at them.
.. Second, there’s a nearly constant stream of insults in the background directed at a wider range of subjects. These insults can be a response to a news event, unfavorable media coverage or criticism, or they can simply be a random thought. These subjects receive short bursts of attention, and inevitably Mr. Trump turns to other things in a day or two. Mr. Trump’s brief feuds with Macy’s, Elizabeth Warren, John McCain and The New Hampshire Union Leader fit this bucket well. The election has not changed this pattern either...Mr. Trump frequently insulted journalists and media organizations even before he was a serious presidential candidate. Early on, Mr. Trump focused on conservative publications and commentators who stood against him: Bill Kristol, George Will, Glenn Beck, Charles Krauthammer, Stuart Stevens. As the campaign progressed and media scrutiny increased, Mr. Trump focused on the larger news organizations and the national press, particularly after coverage critical of him. One particularly big insult campaign began in the days after a New York Times article about his behavior toward women.