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WASHINGTON Cmon, @Jack. You can do it.

Throw on some Kendrick Lamar and get your head in the right space. Pour yourself a big old glass of salt juice. Draw an ice bath and fire up the cryotherapy pod and the infrared sauna. Then just pull the plug on him. You know you want to.

You could answer the existential question of whether @realDonaldTrump even exists if he doesnt exist on Twitter. I tweet, therefore I am. Dorsey meets Descartes.

All it would take is one sweet click to force the greatest troll in the history of the internet to meet his maker. Maybe he just disappears in an orange cloud of smoke, screaming, Im melllllllting.

Do Trump and the world a favor and send him back into the void whence he came. And then go have some fun: Meditate and fast for days on end!

Our country is going through biological, economic and societal convulsions. We cant trust the powerful forces in this nation to tell us the truth or do the right thing. In fact, not only can we not trust them. We have every reason to believe theyre gunning for us.

In Washington, the Trump administrations deception about the virus was lethal. On Wall Street and in Silicon Valley, the fat cats who carved up the country, drained us dry and left us with no safety net profiteered off the virus. In Minneapolis, the barbaric death of George Floyd after a police officer knelt on him for almost nine minutes showed yet again that black Americans have everything to fear from some who are charged with protecting them.

As if that werent enough, from the slough of our despond, we have to watch Donald Trump duke it out with the lords of the cloud in a contest to see who can destroy our democracy faster.

I wish I could go along with those who say this dark period of American life will ultimately make us nicer and simpler and more contemplative. How can that happen when the whole culture has been re-engineered to put us at each others throats?

Trump constantly torques up the tribal friction and cruelty, even as Twitter and Facebook refine their systems to ratchet up rage. It is amazing that a septuagenarian became the greatest exploiter of social media. Trump and Twitter were a match made in hell.

The Wall Street Journal had a chilling report a few days ago that Facebooks own research in 2018 revealed that our algorithms exploit the human brains attraction to divisiveness. If left unchecked, Facebook would feed users more and more divisive content in an effort to gain user attention & increase time on the platform.

Mark Zuckerberg shelved the research.

Why not just let all the bots trying to undermine our elections and spreading false information about the coronavirus and right-wing conspiracy theories and smear campaigns run amok? Sure, were weakening our society, but the weird, infantile maniacs running Silicon Valley must be allowed to rake in more billions and finish their mission of creating a giant cyberorganism of people, one huge and lucrative ball of rage.

The shareholders of Facebook decided, If you can increase my stock tenfold, we can put up with a lot of rage and hate, says Scott Galloway, professor of marketing at New York Universitys Stern School of Business.

These platforms have very dangerous profit motives. When you monetize rage at such an exponential rate, its bad for the world. These guys dont look left or right; they just look down. Theyre willing to promote white nationalism if theres money in it. The rise of social media will be seen as directly correlating to the decline of Western civilization.

Dorsey, who has more leeway because his stock isnt as valuable as Facebooks, made some mild moves against the president who has been spewing lies and inciting violence on Twitter for years. He added footnotes clarifying false Trump tweets about mail-in ballots and put a warning label on the presidents tweet about the Minneapolis riots that echo the language of a Miami police chief in 1967 and segregationist George Wallace: When the looting starts, the shooting starts.

Jack is really sincerely trying to find something to make it better, said one friend of the Twitter chiefs. Hes like somebody trapped in a maze, going down every hallway and turning every corner.

Zuckerberg, on the other hand, went on Fox to report that he was happy to continue enabling the Emperor of Chaos, noting that he did not think Facebook should be the arbiter of truth of everything that people say online.

It was a sickening display that made even some loyal Facebook staffers queasy. As The Verges Casey Newton reported, some employees objected to the companys rationale in internal posts.

I have to say I am finding the contortions we have to go through incredibly hard to stomach, one wrote. All this points to a very high risk of a violent escalation and civil unrest in November and if we fail the test case here, history will not judge us kindly.

Trump, furious that Dorsey would attempt to rein him in on the very platform that catapulted him into the White House, immediately decided to try to rein in Dorsey.

He signed an executive order that might strip liability protection from social media sites, which would mean they would have to more assiduously police false and defamatory posts. Now that social media sites are behemoths, Galloway thinks that the removal of the Communications Decency Act makes a lot of sense even if the president is trying to do it for the wrong reasons.

Trump does not seem to realize, however, that hes removing his own protection. He huffs and puffs about freedom of speech when he really wants the freedom to be vile. Its the mother of all cutting-off-your-nose-to-spite-your-face moves, says Galloway.

The president wants to say things on Twitter that he will not be allowed to say if he exerts this control over Twitter. In a sense, its Trump versus his own brain. If Twitter can be sued for what people say on it, how can Trump continue to torment? Wouldnt thousands of his own tweets have to be deleted?

Hed be the equivalent of a slippery floor at a store that sells equipment for hip replacements, says Galloway, who also posits that, in our hyper-politicized world, this will turn Twitter into a Democratic site and Facebook into a Republican one.

Nancy Pelosi, whose district encompasses Twitter, said that it did little good for Dorsey to put up a few fact-checks while letting Trumps rants about murder and other misrepresentations stay up.

Facebook, all of them, they are all about making money, the speaker said. Their business model is to make money at the expense of the truth and the facts. She crisply concluded that all they want is to not pay taxes; they got their tax break in 2017 and they dont want to be regulated, so they pander to the White House.

Originally posted here:
Trump, Twitter and Jack Dorsey - The New York Times

President Donald Trump talks to reporters following a closed Senate Republican policy lunch meeting to discuss the response to the coronavirus outbreak on Capitol Hill, May 19, 2020.(Yuri Gripas/Reuters)The president faces a much tougher road to reelection than most seem to think.

President Trump was disappointed. Bad weather on Wednesday forced a delay in SpaceXs planned launch of the Dragon spacecraft, robbing the president of a prized photo opportunity. He plans to attend the next launch, scheduled for May 30 at 3:22 p.m. EDT, but the spoiled visit to Florida punctuated another week of foreboding news from the campaign trail.

The coronavirus has left President Trump without his signature issue (the economy) and without his preferred venue (the tentpole rally). The bump in his approval rating as Americans rallied around the flag at the outset of the crisis is gone. Assessments of Trumps performance during the pandemic look a lot like his approval rating overall: polarized by party, andupside down. He continues to trail Joe Biden in bothnationalandswingstatepolls. The margins are narrow, but they are also consistent. President Trump has not been ahead in any live-interview national poll conducted this year.

Yet an aura of invincibility surrounds the president. That is why the same polls that show him losing to Biden also show that the public expects him to win. It is whybetting marketsfavor him, too. After all, the story goes, Trump accomplished the impossible in 2016. He defeated thesecond-most-unpopular candidate in American history(he was number one) against all odds. Why cant he do it again? The presidents imagination, ruthlessness, and guile, the shortcomings of his uninspiring and slightly out-of-it opponent, andthe Teflon qualityof this campaign have lulled the public and the GOP into a sense of complacency. Sure, things look bad. But Trump will find a way out of it. He always does.

Well, maybe not this time. The 2020 election looks more and more like a contest between luck and precedent. On one side is President Trumps incredible run of good fortune. On the other side is the weight of history. Consider: Every president reelected since Mr. Gallups first poll in 1935 enjoyed at least one day, and often several, when his approval rating was above 50 percent. That is something President Trumphas not experienced.

Not since 1940 has a president been reelected with a double-digit unemployment rate. Nor has a president been reelected with an unemployment ratetwo or more points higherthan when he entered office. Unemployment was15 percentin April 2020, and is expected to rise for at least a while longer. It was5 percentin January 2017. The recovery will need to have the trajectory of an Elon Musk rocket for unemployment to fall to less than 7 percent by November 3.

That is when America will hold its 59th presidential election. In all but five of the previous 58 contests, the same man won both the popular and electoral votes. The fact that two of the exceptions occurred in the past 20 years has distorted our perspective. We begin to consider it not only possible but probable that President Trump could win reelection without winning the popular vote.

History suggests that what is possible is also unlikely. Reelection was a prize awarded to just one of the four men before Trump who entered office on the basis of the Electoral College alone. John Quincy Adams lost to Andrew Jackson in the rematch of 1828. Rutherford B. Hayes did not run for a second term in 1880. Benjamin Harrison lost to Grover Cleveland in the rematch of 1892. The exception was George W. Bush, who defeated John Kerry in both the popular and electoral votes in 2004.

Bush, like Trump, faced an unexpected crisis in his first term. His decisive and compassionate leadership during the 9/11 attacks and their aftermath was an important factor in his reelection. Voters for whom terrorism was the most important issue backed Bush by a 72-point margin,according to the exit poll, and at that time majorities approved of the war in Iraq (51 percent) and considered it part of the war on terrorism (55 percent). Bushs approval rating in the exit poll was 53 percent.

In theMay 27 ReutersIpsos poll, the public disapproved of President Trumps handling of the coronavirus pandemic, while backing him on the economy and jobs. His job approval was 41 percent. In theMay 21 Fox poll, it was 44 percent. Nowhere close to where it has to be to win a second term.

And so, America waits for Trump to pull a rabbit out of his hat. What might that look like? A stunning economic rebound would bolster the presidents strengths and restore confidence in his stewardship. Trumps opponent might delegitimize himself through continued gaffes, a vice-presidential selection that frightens more people than it reassures, and debate performances that heighten concerns about age and ability. Something unexpected might happen. The campaign is young. As a wise manonce wrote, only an idiot would bet against Donald Trump.

Right now, though, Republicans have every reason to be worried about November.

This piece first appeared in the Washington Free Beacon.

The rest is here:
Trump in Trouble - National Review

The presidents executive order on social media will kick off a heated debate over free speech on the internet that will, in all likelihood, lead to nothing. This manufactured dispute is a distraction for the media, and it will almost certainly be an effective one. It would be in everyones interest including its own if Twitter pulled the plug on this specious debate, banned Trump for repeated and egregious violations of its rules, and helped us all focus on whats more important.

More than 100,000 people in the United States have died of Covid-19, more than any other nation in the world. The figure is probably an undercount.

More than 1.7 million people in the US have had confirmed cases of Covid-19, more than any other nation in the world. The figure is almost certainly an undercount.

The US federal government completely botched the rollout of testing for the coronavirus at the beginning of the pandemic, and continues to lag in providing adequate testing for its populace.

Before the pandemic, more than 38 million Americans were living in poverty.

More than 40 million Americans have filed for unemployment in the past 10 weeks.

Before the pandemic, 11.2 million US children lived in a food-insecure household.

Experts project that pandemic-related unemployment could increase the number of children experiencing food-insecurity to between 12.4 million and 18 million, or one out of every four children.

The Covid-19 mortality rate for black Americans is more than twice as high as the rate for white, Latino and Asian Americans.

More than 60,000 healthcare workers in the US have been infected with the coronavirus and nearly 300 have died.

US hospitals laid off 1.4 million healthcare workers in April.

There is no federal plan to address any of this.

The death toll keeps rising.

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Why Twitter should ban Donald Trump - The Guardian

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New Delhi: US President Donald Trump Friday announced the termination of the North American giants relationship with the World Health Organization (WHO), making it the latest addition to a long list of institutions and pacts the US has withdrawn from under his administration.

Ever since he came to power, the US has either permanently withdrawn from or substantially cut the funding of several United Nations agencies and multilateral pacts pertaining to trade and environment. His administration has used different means to handicap other global institutions too for instance, the US blocked the appointment of judges to the World Trade Organisation (WTO), rendering the trade regulator as largely meaningless.

Many of these were initiated or created by the US in the post-war era.

ThePrint lists the institutions, pacts and other global and bilateral arrangements the US has withdrawn from or weakened under Trumps leadership.

Also read:Chinas muscle-flexing in Ladakh doesnt mean theres a war coming, says former NSA

Soon after getting into office in November 2016, President Donald Trump decided to pull out the US from theTrans-Pacific Partnership, which was a plurilateral preferential trade agreement involving 12 Pacific Rim countries such as Canada, Japan, Australia and ASEAN nations. He called it a bad, bad deal for America. If the US had continued to remain a part of the TPP, the signatories would have represented roughly 40 per cent of the global GDP.

In June 2017, the US pulled out of the 2015 Paris Climate Deal, which was originally signed by 196 countries, for not being fair. The agreements long-term goal was to keep the rise of global temperature below the 2 degree Celsius from pre-industrial levels and ideally keep its below 1.5 degrees. The move was opposed by climate activists in the US and across the world.

In October 2017, the US announced its decision to withdraw from the UNs educational, scientific and cultural organisation. It quit UNESCO along with Israel and attacked the agency for its anti-Israel bias. The U.S. has demanded fundamental reform in the agency that is best known for its World Heritage program to protect cultural sites and traditions, noted a PBS report.

Also read:UK wants 5G alliance of 10 countries, including India, to avoid reliance on Chinese Huawei

In December 2017, the US decided to leave the negotiations on the proposed UN deal for a Global Compact for Migration, an international agreement on managing safe, orderly, and regular migration around the globe.

In May 2018, the Trump administration decided to renege from the 2015 Iran nuclear deal, officially known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, for being too favourable to the Hassan Rouhani regime. The deal was signed by the five permanent members of the UN Security Council (UNSC) and Germany and Iran. As a part of the deal, Iran had agreed to not develop nuclear weapons. Since the US move, Iran has agreed to a phased withdrawal from agreement restarting stockpiling and increasing uranium enrichment.

In June 2018, the US withdrew from the United Nations Human Rights Council stating that the agency had an anti-Israel bias. The body was set up in 2006 and works towards the promotion and protection of human rights across the world.

The Donald Trump administration announced its decision to end decades of funding to the United Nations Relief and Works Agency in August 2018 for the agencys alleged anti-Israel bias. While the UNRWA is meant to help refugees across the world, a substantial part of its work was directing towards aiding Palestinian refugees.

Also read:Boris Johnsons 20% drop in approval ratings, Wuhans testing miracle and other Covid news

Trump has also facilitated US withdrawal from several US-Russia arms control treaties such as the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces, with the latest being Open Skies Treaty. Currently, New START is the only remaining major arms control treaty between the US and Russia. Unless renewed, this treaty is set to collapse next February, and would mean the end of mutual arms cooperation between the two powers.

While the US President has repeatedly attacked the WTO and threatened to quit the organisation, he has refrained from doing so until now. According to him, the WTO, which has the primary task of dispute resolution between member countries, hasnt been fair to the US in its rulings. However, the Trump administration has crippled the global trade regulator by blocking the appointment of judges to WTO. Currently, the WTO has only a single judge left.

Donald Trump has also weakened the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation by denying to publicly announce US adherence to Article 5 of the NATO Charter. This article pertains to the idea of collective defence commitment the underlying idea of the military alliance. By choosing not to support it, Trump has undermined the very credibility of the alliance.

Also read:Trump unleashing fury at Twitter on Twitter is only helping its business

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Paris deal to WHO, the 11 organisations Donald Trumps US has pulled out of, weakened - ThePrint

"There is NO WAY (ZERO!) that Mail-In Ballots will be anything less than substantially fraudulent. Mail boxes will be robbed, ballots will be forged & even illegally printed out & fraudulently signed. The Governor of California is sending Ballots to millions of people, anyone living in the state, no matter who they are or how they got there, will get one. That will be followed up with professionals telling all of these people, many of whom have never even thought of voting before, how, and for whom, to vote. This will be a Rigged Election. No way!"

That follows hard on a Memorial Day weekend spent attacking plans by states to increase their vote-by-mail efforts as a way to help mitigate a possible second surge of the coronavirus in the fall.

Now, before we go any further, it's worth noting here that the sort of widespread election fraud that Trump is talking about is incredibly rare. In fact, there's just no significant evidence of intentional voter fraud on anything near the scale Trump and his allies allege. Never has been.

Study after study that make this fact plain.

How many examples did he find? Exactly 31 -- out of more than 1 billion instances. 31! (That's an infinitesimally small number.) That's not to say that each of those 31 instances of attempted voter fraud isn't worth an investigation. We don't want any voter fraud. But it is to say that 31 instances out of more than 1 billion is nothing anywhere close to widespread voter fraud.

So then, why is Trump so fixated on a problem that doesn't exist? The key lies in a single word he keeps using when talking about mail-in balloting: "Rigged."

Notice the pattern? This is a man who cannot accept losing in any way, shape or form. And when faced with defeat or setback, he insists that the rules were broken, that something nefarious happened -- although he never says exactly what.

Which brings us back to Trump's attacks on mail-in balloting in the November election. What he's doing is simple: Laying the groundwork to never admit defeat if he winds up losing to former Vice President Joe Biden in the fall.

If Trump does lose, he will insist that it was not the result of voters choosing Biden over him but rather a function of those cheating Democrats and their "rigged" mail-in ballot scheme -- because Donald Trump doesn't lose. And the only way he could lose is if he was cheated in some way.

All because Trump isn't capable of admitting he might not always be the best at everything always.

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Here's the *real* reason Donald Trump is attacking mail-in ballots - CNN