Trump should spend more time being presidential and saving lives than he does tweeting…and yet here we are with 100,000+ deaths and no end to his twitter rants. So what exactly did Trump do Memorial Day weekend? As Americans were dying from coronavirus, Trump had a fun day golfing and tweeting.
As of Wednesday, May 27th our country reached the shocking milestone of 100,000 dead Americans from coronavirus in about 100 days. That’s about 1/3 of the total global death toll. We are number one in the world when it comes to deaths. What did Trump do? He spent his Memorial Day weekend playing golf and going on a Twitter rampage. Ok, he did one presidential thing. He laid a wreath at Arlington Cemetary, and read something presidential from a script someone wrote for him. After he was done with those official duties, he returned to the White House and Tweeted out a bunch of nauseating trash talk.
Trump is obsessed about a sick, disgusting, baseless conspiracy theory about Joe Scarborough of “Morning Joe” on MSNBC who Trump is mad at because that show calls him out over and over again every single morning. Trump falsely accuses Joe Scarborough of murdering a former staffer by the name of Lori Klausutis. Lori Klausutis had an undiagnosed heart condition and one day at work she keeled over, hit her head and died. There was an investigation and no evidence of foul play. But Trump is using Twitter to amp up his 80 million followers against anyone Trump hates and wants to silence or neutralize.
When he (Trump) returned to the White House on Saturday, Mr. Trump was active online, even revisiting debunked conspiracy theories about Joe Scarborough, the MSNBC host, implying that he was under investigation for murdering a former staff member in 2001. “A blow to her head? Body found under his desk? Left Congress suddenly? Big topic of discussion in Florida,” Mr. Trump wrote on Twitter. “Big topic of discussion in Florida…and, he’s a Nut Job (with bad ratings) Keep digging, use forensic geniuses!” (NYT)
Twitter has rules that people are supposed to abide by.
Twitter Rules: You may not engage in the targeted harassment of someone, or incite other people to do so. We consider abusive behavior an attempt to harass, intimidate, or silence someone else’s voice.
Lori’s husband, Timothy Klausutis, wrote a letter to Jack Dorsey, the CEO of Twitter, asking that these offensive tweets from Trump that push fake news conspiracies and defame his wife’s memory be deleted. Klausutis expressing his outrage and sadness about what Twitter has allowed Trump to get away with.
“I have mourned my wife every day since her passing. I have tried to honor her memory and our marriage,” he wrote to Mr. Dorsey, with the kind of enduring dignity that would be nice to see more of from our leaders. “There has been a constant barrage of falsehoods, half-truths, innuendo and conspiracy theories since the day she died. I realize that may sound like an exaggeration, unfortunately it is the verifiable truth. Because of this, I have struggled to move forward with my life.”
Kara Swisher also spoke out. She is an American technology business journalist and co-founder of Recode who became a contributing writer to The New York Times Opinion Section in 2018. Previously she wrote for The Wall Street Journal, and was a co-executive editor of All Things Digital. Swisher wrote an op ed that appeared in the New York Times calling Trump out for his unacceptable behavior and asking Jack Dorsey to take action to limit the damage from Trump’s vile Twitter feed. She makes a few suggestions about what to do. One is to simply delete the inaccurate information. Another is to set up a board to weigh in on Twitter violations. I can only imagine the ruckus that would ignite from Trump loyalists.
Dorsey has not removed Trump’s incendiary tweets but on Tuesday, for the first time, Twitter slapped a fact-check label on Trump’s tweets that falsely claim that mail-in ballots are part of a pattern of voter fraud and redirected the readers to news articles that provide accurate information. A step in the right direction.
By-the-way, only 8 percent of U.S. adults say they follow Trump’s Twitter account (@realDonaldTrump), and only 4 percent say they follow his account and regularly read the president’s tweets, according to a Gallup poll. And 60% of Americans don’t want Trump to tweet.
American women, especially those over 50, are turning their backs on Trump in a big way as the coronavirus sweeps across the nation and our economy falls apart thanks in large measure to Trump’s failure to lead a federal response to this crisis. Trump trails Biden by double digit numbers with this voting group in 6 key swing states. For the first time, red state Georgia is in play. The internal polling done by the Trump campaign show this crucial voting bloc of older women slipping away from Trump. This development has gotten under his thin skin. Vanityfair.com/news/2020/05/trump-whines-about-his-covid-19-victimhood-as-campaign-flails
Maybe the problem with Trump’s tweets is that the news media amplifies them too much by breathlessly repeating their content. Maybe the news should do what more and more American women seem to have figured out, namely, turn away, not bother to read or listen to or give air time to Trump anymore.
It’s time to turn our collective backs on the Twit wit-in-chief.
