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How many times in the 19-and-a-half weeks since January 20th have you needed to remind yourself to breathe, to remain calm, not to panic? Do you regularly tell yourself it can't possibly be as bad as you think? Are you worried you're overreacting?

You aren't. It's as bad as you think, and possibly worse. We've elected a president who isn't just unqualified for the job but who actively hurts the United States every day. Your palms should be clammy with fear.

I'm not just speaking to my fellow liberal snowflakes. I guarantee you the conservatives and Republicans who have been shaking their heads quietly as their president sticks his gnarled foot in his enormous mouth have started to feel the silent creep of fear crawl up the backs of their necks too.

It has gotten that bad. He is that bad. He's a toddler, but with less empathy and self-control.

Over the last few days, Trump has shown himself to be more unfit than ever before and made it clear he has no business remaining in the White House for even one additional day. Let's take a brief stroll through the Twitter feed of the current president of the United States.

Trump reacted to terrorist attacks with false bravado and genuine stupidity long before becoming president. But since January, optimists have hoped the enormity of his responsibilities would bring out his better nature. They didn't realize he doesn't have one.

Saturday's London Bridge attack in particular seems to have shorted something in the president's brain. The United Kingdom's strict gun control laws likely kept more dangerous weapons out of the hands of the terrorists, saving countless lives. (Meanwhile, in Orlando Monday, a law-abiding gun owner walked into his former workplace and murdered five people before killing himself.)

Trump then took to Twitter to attack the mayor of London who is Muslim taking out of context a quote urging citizens not to be alarmed by increased police presence.

The president attacking the mayor of the largest city of our closest ally in the wake of a terror attack is just as horrific as you think it is. It is unthinking, unhinged and unkind. In a moment when any remotely normal human being would be offering sympathy and help, Trump has only bile to offer.

Just like you, the lawyers in the office of the solicitor general are probably reminding themselves not to panic on a daily basis. Five separate times this week, Trump tweeted the words "TRAVEL BAN" to describe the, well, travel bans he signed directed at Muslim-majority countries.

Trump's own spokesman has insisted the executive order is "not a travel ban" because calling it a "ban" is a legal disaster for the administration, which has failed so far in defending the policy in court. Trump's rhetoric only makes his lawyers' job more difficult, but he doesn't care. Instead of doing the prudent thing and not talking about an ongoing legal case, Trump is making it virtually impossible to win, choosing to throw a tantrum in public instead.

As late as Tuesday morning, Trump's Twitter unraveling continued. The decision by Saudi Arabia and other Middle East nations to cut ties with Qatar is, to understate matters, a diplomatic situation of extreme delicacy. Instead of handling the situation with even a modicum of common sense, Trump took sides on Twitter.

Attacking established adversaries like Iran or North Korea is one thing. Qatar hosts thelargest American military base in the Middle East. Jumping into the fray to attack the nation is beyond stupid; it endangers the 11,000 members of the U.S. armed forces who live there.

I'm not going to speculate on the mental health of the president. I'm not qualified, and ultimately I'm not certain it matters whether these extraordinary lapses in judgment are the result of dementia, pathological narcissism, sociopathy or just a shitty personality. What matters is what the president of the United States is saying publicly, every day, and the extraordinary damage he is doing to the nation and its people.

There is only one sensible reaction to Trump's antics: for members of Congress and influential conservatives to demand he resign.

You and I both know he's not leaving the White House willingly, or at least not anytime soon. But this is no longer anything approaching a close call. The things the president says and writes, in public, are more than enough evidence to declare him grossly unfit for a job as a tollbooth operator, let alone as the most powerful person in the world.

Many of the Republicans defending him in Congress and on TV see his tweets and know he's crossed the line. They'll keep defending him; they're too afraid of primary elections in their own districts to take a strong line against Trump.

But they should reconsider. Whatever is causing Trump to unravel, it's putting the rest of us in serious danger. The continued spectacle of the Russia investigation is only fueling his descent. Why wait for it to unfold further? The best-case scenario is dragging the nation through a prolonged impeachment ordeal. If not, we have to wait until 2021 to replace him with a responsible and decent human being assuming he doesn't get us all killed by then.

There's a better way. Start the discussion now. Call on Trump to step down. Hell, if you're a Republican, you end up with President Mike Pence, and you probably love Mike Pence. I can't stand the guy, but at least he won't start World War III with an ill-advised 4 a.m. tweet.

It would take enormous, sustained pressure from both sides of the aisle to convince Trump to resign the presidency. It's possible it would never work. The delicate bubble of ego that Trump keeps overinflated around himself never allows errors to reach his muddled mind. Stepping down would be admitting a failure on an enormous scale, and admitting failure is the one thing Trump won't do.

But whether you're a liberal or a conservative or somewhere in between, if you care about your country really care about the greatness of America it's clear Trump can no longer be president. And urging him to step down now is the only option we have to get him out quickly.

Besides, think of how much more golf he'd get to play.

Whether Trump eventually will be forced out of office is as much a political question as it is a legal one. Find out how impeaching him would work. Watch here.

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Read more from the original source:
It's Time to Demand Donald Trump's Resignation - RollingStone.com

Forbes

How Donald Trump Shifted Kids-Cancer Charity Money Into His Business Forbes LIKE AUTUMN LEAVES, sponsored Cadillacs, Ferraris and Maseratis descend on the Trump National Golf Club in Westchester County, New York, in September for the Eric Trump Foundation golf invitational. Year after year, the formula is consistent: 18 holes ... and more »

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How Donald Trump Shifted Kids-Cancer Charity Money Into His Business - Forbes

White House press secretary Sean Spicer said President Trump's use of Twitter "gives him an opportunity to speak straight to the American people," and is an effective tool, on June 6 at the White House. (Reuters)

This article has been updated.

During the daily press briefing at the White House on Tuesday, press secretary Sean Spicer was asked about President Trumps tweet earlier in the day claiming that the media was trying to get him to stop tweeting. (We very much are not.)

Wasnt it the case, Spicer was asked, that Trump often does himself more harm than good with his from-the-hip tweeting?

The president is the most effective messenger on his agenda, Spicer replied. I think his use of social media he now has a collective total of close to 110 million people across different platforms gives him an opportunity to speak straight to the American people, which has proved to be a very, very effective tool.

One can debate whether Trumps Twitter feed has been terribly effective at making him successful, post-election. But one cannot debate the assertion that Trump has 110 million people following him on social media, because he doesnt.

Trump has at least two accounts on four of the biggest social media platforms. Combined, those accounts have about 93.1 million followers. Here they are, in descending order of number of followers. (All figures are as of writing.)

Trumps got accounts on Snapchat, too: realdonaldtrump and whitehouse. Snapchat doesnt release public figures about the number of followers.

Clearly, 93.1 million is a smaller number than 110 million. So where do those other 17-odd million come from? Some come from Snapchat, but generally, its not clear. The term social media is nebulous. Does YouTube count? Trumps account there has about 109,000 followers. What about Reddit? The virulent pro-Trump community r/The_Donald claims 6 million subscribers, but thats not social media, and that figure should be taken with a grain of salt.

But even if we manage to cobble together some number that gets close to 110 million, there are two very good reasons that Trumps not followed by 110 million people. First, a lot of those people follow multiple accounts across those networks and, second, some followers are robots.

This latter point seized the publics imagination last week as rumors that Trump was buying Twitter followers were rampant. (Trump saw an uptick in his follower count, but not by the millions, and theres no indicator that anything untoward was happening.) But those rumors centered around the idea that an army of bots that is, automated accounts driven by code, not people was being created to do something nefarious. People dutifully plugged Trumps Twitter accounts into tools that try to estimate how many fake accounts followed Trump and determined that perhaps half of his followers fit that description.

Its important here to interject with two other important points. First of all, botsplay the role in the public imagination that atomic energy played in 1950s comic books. Its this sort of vaguely understood thing thats generally assumed to be bad, and the negative effects of bots are blown way out of proportion. Bots are our modern boogeyman, and we tend to overinflatetheir existence and impact. That includes those are my followers bots? tools, which just look at how often people have tweeted and when their accounts were created and so on, and are therefore not necessarily a good guide to how many of the accounts actually arent driven by humans.

That said, there are certainly thousands or millions of followers of the @realdonaldtrump account who are actually automated accounts. There are also any number of followers that are tied to businesses or tied back to the same individual. For example, I have probably a dozen Twitter accounts tied to my name, since I make little bots like @trumphop, which automatically retweets old Trump tweets. Lots of other people have multiple accounts, too.

Which loops us back to the first point. If youre active on political Twitter, you probably follow both @realdonaldtrump and @POTUS. You may follow both Trump and the White House on Facebook. Trump fans almost certainly follow him on both Twitter and Facebook, and probably Instagram, too. Its very fair to assume that at least half of the followers on Trumps social media accounts also follow one of his other accounts which would mean that, instead of 93.1 million people following him, the number is closer to 47 million.

But lets be more generous than that and assume that not everyone follows him on at least two of those accounts. Lets assume that only a third do. That would mean that about 62.3 million people follow him on social media or about one person for every vote he got last year. And many of those people live outside the United States or are bots.

In short, Spicers count of how many people are tracking Trump on social media is clearly inflated. But then, this is the guy whose first day on the job was spent defending the claim that 1.5 million people attended Trumps inauguration.

Maybe Spicers just bad at math.

Update: And maybe Im bad at Facebook. Added the POTUS account there, after missing it first time around.

Read more from the original source:
No, Donald Trump doesn't have 110 million people following him on social media - Washington Post

President Donald Trump is by no means popularcompared with his predecessors, his approval rating has been remarkably low during his time in the White House. But there's some small solace for the president this week: His approval rating is, at least for the moment, a hair better then where President Bill Clintonstood at the same point in his first term.

Different polling outfits putTrump at varying levels of approval, but the RealClearPolitics average hadhim at 39.8 percent Tuesday, while the weighted average from FiveThirtyEight hadhim atexactly 39 percent. Not great numbers, but still better than Clinton. On Day 138 of his presidency, just 37.8 percent of Americans approved of the job he was doing, according to FiveThirtyEight.

If you compare where each president stood at this point in the Gallup tracking poll, however, the two are deadlocked. The most recent Gallup survey pegged Trump's approval at 37 percent, the exact same figure the polling company found for Clinton in early June1993. Trump's disapproval rating in the survey was far higher, however, outpacing Clinton at 57 percent to 49 percent.

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A number of factors were blamed for Clinton's low approval at the time. The economy wasn't exactly humming along. There werethe beginnings of an ethics controversy over the White House travel office. Clintonalso allowed gay people to serve in the military under the "don't ask, don't tell" policy thatangered people, both for allowing gay people to serve and for not treating gay people equally.

"I never expected that I could take on some of these interests that I've taken on without being attacked," Clinton said about the approval polls at the time."And whenever you try to change things, there are always people there ready to point out the pain of change without the promise of it, and that's just all part of it. If I worried about the poll ratings, I'd never get anything done here."

Clinton's numbers soon turned around, and by the end of June, Gallup had him in the mid-40s. By the time he left office, 66 percent of the country approved of him.

Trump, meanwhile, has seen his approval rating decline steadily since he moved into the White House. The FBI investigation into his campaign's possible ties to Russiawhich, the U.S. intelligence community says,worked to get Trump electedcertainly hasn't helped the president's popularity.

A major event involvingthat controversy is scheduled for Thursday, when former FBI Directory James Comeywhom Trump firedis expected to testify before the Senate Intelligence Committee. Comey will almost certainly address a conversationwith Trump during which the president reportedly urged him to end theinvestigation into former National Security Adviser Michael Flynn.

Polls, meanwhile,have shownthat voters are concerned about the Russia investigationand how Trump has handled it. Meaning that it seems likely the president could trail Clinton again soon.

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Donald Trump's Approval Rating Is Better Than Bill Clinton's at This Point in His First Term - Newsweek

Reality Leigh Winner, 25, was employed as a contractor with Pluribus International Corp., a government facility in Georgia from around February 13, according to an affidavit supporting her arrest. Her Twitter activity dropped significantly after that date.

The Justice Department announced charges Monday against Winner. She is accused of leaking classified information, used as the basis for an article The Intercept published Monday, detailing a classified National Security Agency memo.

She also uses her Twitter username @Reezlie on Instagram; however, her activity on the two platforms differed dramatically. On Instagram, she primarily posted selfies from the gym and pictures of food, while on Twitter she rarely posted about herself, focusing more on politics -- behavior not uncommon for people who use both social networks.

Winner follows 50 Twitter accounts, among them Edward Snowden, WikiLeaks, several with links to the group Anonymous and "alt" government agency accounts that became popular after President Donald Trump's inauguration, including AltFDA. None of the accounts appear to be personal connections.

Winner didn't hide her disdain for Trump. On Election Night, when it became apparent that Trump would win, she tweeted, "Well. People suck. #ElectionNight"

On February 11, she was particularly active on the social network, tweeting directly at the President, describing him as an "orange fascist."

Melania and I are hosting Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe and Mrs. Abe at Mar-a-Lago in Palm Beach, Fla. They are a wonderful couple!

the most dangerous entry to this country was the orange fascist we let into the white house

Winner didn't appear to post explicitly about hacking or leaking but did retweet and like several tweets on the topic.

She "liked' a tweet from the hacking group Anonymous in November that hinted at hacking a Mac computer the then-President-elect was using.

Winner also favorited a February 15 tweet linking to an article about White House press secretary Sean Spicer's reported lax approach to his personal data security and also liked a WikiLeaks tweet linking to a Wall Street Journal reported headlined, "Spies Keep Intelligence From Donald Trump on Leak Concerns."

She follows several "rogue" Twitter accounts designed to look like they are run by federal agencies. Many of these accounts claim to be run by agency employees unhappy with the Trump administration.

She retweeted a post in January from the "Rogue NASA" account that attempted to explain why such accounts were becoming more popular.

Rogue Twitter accounts are fun, but gov't employees and scientists are very afraid of being fired if they speak out & share facts. #resist

Winner's Twitter activity slowed in mid-February, and the last time she appeared to tweet before her arrest Saturday was on March 5, when she tweeted at Anonymous, "what happened to the Feb 28th call for Trump to resign?"

Her mother, Billie Winner, said her daughter wasn't especially political and had not praised past leakers such as Snowden to her. "She's never ever given me any kind of indication that she was in favor of that at all," her mother said. "I don't know how to explain it."

Her court-appointed attorney, Titus Nichols, told CNN he was unable to confirm Tuesday that the Twitter account was Winner's.

Earlier, he said he believes the government has a political agenda by going after his client, whom he says is a low-level government employee. Nichols said he hasn't seen anything that would lead him to believe Winner is guilty of these charges.

CNN has reached out to Pluribus International to ask if it was aware of Winner's Twitter account.

CNN's Nick Valencia contributed to this report.

Read more:
Accused leaker Reality Winner called Trump an 'orange fascist' on Twitter - CNN International