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Trump Twitter Meltdown: Threatens to Shut Media Platforms, Attacks Scarborough

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The questions now arise: is Donald Trump exploding (and perhaps politically imploding) because of one ore more of the following: 1)he is down 15 points in three weeks in the Rasmussen poll, which he usually praises because it often shows higher approval for him 2)is starting to panic about his re-election (we are not even into June yet and many things can change) or 3)out of control with no real checks and balances.

In recent days has doggedly raised a discredited conspiracy that accuses his critic of murder and threatened to shut down Twitter because if ran a fact-check line under some of his tweets. He is now facing a firestorm of criticism that even includes some GOPers and conservative Murdoch-owned media giants such as The Wall Street Journal and The New York Post.

Trump’s smear of his onetime best-bud Scarborough illustrates his strong capacity not only nurse a grudge but to take it to as many levels as he can which can mean new heights given a President’s power. Past Presidents’ gripes and reactions are tepid compared to Trump’s. And his threat to shut down or look into Twitter or Fracebook illustrates smacks of authoritarian tendencies which if unchecked could further blow more American norms to smithereens.

The New York Times:

Even President Trump’s most stalwart media defenders have recoiled at his baseless smears against the MSNBC host Joe Scarborough, whom Mr. Trump has all but accused of killing a former staff member two decades ago despite a total lack of evidence.

The president is accustomed to — and often relishes — blowback from critics in the press. But he is now facing an unusual chorus of reproach from the media platforms he relies on for comfort.

The New York Post, Mr. Trump’s first read in the mornings, lamented in an editorial on Tuesday that the president “decided to suggest that a TV morning-show host committed murder. That is a depressing sentence to type.” The Post’s editorial board went on to scold its most powerful reader: “Trust us, you did not look like the bigger man.”

“Vile,” declared the editorial board of The Washington Examiner, the popular conservative news site, in a scathing article on Wednesday that called Mr. Trump’s attacks “incompatible with leadership.” Mr. Trump is so enamored of The Examiner that he often grants interviews to its journalists, including one earlier this month.

And the editorial page of The Wall Street Journal, a bellwether of establishment conservative thought, called Mr. Trump’s unfounded accusation against Mr. Scarborough “ugly even for him.”

“We don’t write this with any expectation that Mr. Trump will stop,” The Journal wrote in its editorial. “Perhaps he even thinks this helps him politically, though we can’t imagine how. But Mr. Trump is debasing his office, and he’s hurting the country in doing so.”

New York’s Jonathan Chait offers this analysis:

“The United States is in the midst of its worst economic catastrophe in 90 years, and its deepest public-health crisis in more than 100, and the president is laser-focused on the co-host of a morning cable-news talk show whose audience, about 1.1 million daily viewers, equals less than one third of one percent of the population.

Indeed, to put the matter more precisely, the president is focused on investigating a 20-year-old death that Trump wishes to falsely pin on Morning Joe co-host Joe Scarborough. Trump has tweeted about the case four times since the beginning of Memorial Day weekend. It is, to say the least, a strange issue to focus on given the circumstances. Even if his claims were true, there are far more important issues before him.

This is not a shrewd messaging gambit. It does, however, follow a certain logic.

Obviously a wise and strategic president would not be doing this. The sane strategy for maximizing Trump’s reelection odds would be to manage the public-health response to the pandemic while taking advantage of a Democratic Congress willing to spend almost unlimited sums to pump stimulus into the economy.

But “sane” left the building a long time ago, and Trump is left in a world of second- and third-best strategies. In place of effective governance, he is counting on partisanship to polarize the race, keeping it close enough that he can eke out another win by demonizing his opponent. A crucial element of Trump’s polarization method is to suppress all internal dissent.

This is why Trump relentlessly claims (without any basis, of course) that his approval ratings among Republicans have risen to 95 percent or 96 percent. It is why he devotes so much energy to defining “Never Trumpers” as a hostile clique to be distrusted, and why he lobbed gratuitous insults at Mitt Romney rather than try to patch up his relationship with a man who solicited his endorsement in 2012. Scarborough is dangerous to Trump because he is a Republican, and his criticism undermines Trump’s message that all real Republicans support Trump. And while Trump could choose to ignore Scarborough, he believes in intimidating his critics into silence.

Trump is not a political genius, but he does grasp the power of audacious lies. His most devoted cultists believe everything he says, even the things that contradict other things he says. Perhaps more vital to his success is the political allies who go along with the lies even if they see through them.”

Another reason, among some, is that they have an underlying vested interest in defending Trump, even as he breaks norms and ignores laws they would have vociferously defended years ago. The sharp tribalism of American politics partially explains it. It’s like one side of a football geets angry the ref makes a call that supporters of one team really knows is correct but they boo him nonetheless. Even during Nixon’s final days in office there were many Republicans who defended him despite the broekn laws, the tapes, just as some Democrats pooh-poohed Bill Clinton’s perjury in the Monica Lewinsky scandal. (And, no, that isn’t “whataboutism” it is history).

Meanwhile, Trump is threatening Twitter and social media platforms with shutting them down, a threat legal analysts and experts say he doesn’t have the power to do. On the other hand, today’s Supreme Court doesn’t worship legal precedence as much as previous Supreme Courts have. The Hill:

President Trump on Wednesday morning on Wednesday morning ratcheted up his feud with social media platforms, threatening to “close them down” a day after Twitter fact-checked a pair of the president’s tweets on mail-in voting.

“Republicans feel that Social Media Platforms totally silence conservatives voices. We will strongly regulate, or close them down, before we can ever allow this to happen,” Trump tweeted on Wednesday. “We saw what they attempted to do, and failed, in 2016.”

The president’s comments come a day after he accused Twitter of “stifling FREE SPEECH.”

The move by the social media giant to fact-check the president was a first for the platform, which has received a growing amount of flak about how it deals with misinformation and false statements on its website.

On Trump’s tweets, the platform placed warnings, noting that the president’s claim that California would send mail-in ballots to anyone living in the state was false. Twitter, in its fact-check, also pointed out that Trump himself voted by mail in the Florida Republican presidential primary this year.

Several states already utilize widespread mail-in ballots, including Oregon, Utah and Nebraska.