Trump Sunday tweet roundup — Pandemics and politics, Fake News and FISAGATE dominate his mind
Whether it’s the fact that his body clock is still recovering from his recent trip to India and the reported sleepless journey home or that he’s just so consumed with applying hand sanitizer to ward off coronavirus that his tiny fingers are too slippery to type properly, Donald Trump’s social media post schedule has been thrown off-kilter from his typical pattern of a barrage early morning tweets.
While the president did wake up early enough today to post a cheap shot at Democratic presidential hopeful Mike Bloomberg, announce a new coronavirus screening procedure at U.S. airports, and advertise a MAGA-friendly taco shop, he took a mysterious five-hour break before resuming his addiction to oversharing his brain farts.
His first post naturally was one of self-praise as he cited a poll that he erroneously attributed to The New York Post but is actually a two-week-old Gallup survey that claims 77% of Americans have confidence in his administration’s ability to handle the coronavirus pandemic.
A Poll in today’s New York Post says that 77% of “U.S. adults have confidence in their government’s ability to handle the Coronavirus (Number One), compared to other health threats.” 64% for Zika, 58% for Ebola. Others way down on list. Our professionals are doing a great job!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) March 1, 2020
While for once Trump is accurately reporting the numbers contained in an opinion poll, he fails to mention that the survey was completed two weeks ago, before the disease began spreading extensively in this country, before the first death from the virus occurred here, and before the administration’s early missteps in handling the outbreak were publicly disclosed.
The president next moved on to his controversial re-nomination of Congressman John Ratcliffe (R-TX) to be his next Director of National Intelligence.
Trump had previously nominated Ratcliffe to the same position last summer, only to have the conservative Texas representative withdraw his name from consideration after opposition from the Senate over concerns by former intelligence officials that Ratcliffe might politicize intelligence and after media reports criticized his record in prosecuting terrorism and immigration cases.
Now that Trump has been acquitted by a compliant, Republican-controlled Senate of the impeachment charges he faced, he likely feels that he can get them to roll over at his command and confirm anyone he nominates, no matter how partisan and unqualified for the sensitive position that they may be as he attempts to install loyalists at the top of the intelligence community.
“Who better than @RepRatcliffe, who got to the bottom of the FISAGATE & RUSSIAGATE HOAX. It makes a lot of sense to put John Ratcliffe in there (DNI).The Senate should quickly approve him. @DevinNunes @MariaBartiromo John will do a great job for the American people!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) March 1, 2020
Apparently the primary qualification for a nomination to become the nation’s lead intelligence official is not actual intelligence or experience, but a willingness to buy into whatever paranoid lunatic conspiracy theory the president is peddling on any given day.
Of course, a day cannot pass in the Bizzaro World universe of Trump’s Twitter posts without an attack on the media as an unreliable source of information since it is only the words that come from the mouth of the president himself that contain the “real” truth about what’s happening in the world and how it should be interpreted.
People are disgusted and embarrassed by the Fake News Media, as headed by the @nytimes, @washingtonpost, @comcast & MSDNC, @ABC, @CBSNews and more. They no longer believe what they see and read, and for good reason. Fake News is, indeed, THE ENEMY OF THE PEOPLE!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) March 1, 2020
Trump lists the most credible news sources in America and proceeds to gaslight the nation by describing them with a term much more suited as a description of his own actions since taking office as so many of his policies have demonstrated — THE ENEMY OF THE PEOPLE!
Perfectly fulfilling the mission of dividing and weakening America that Russian President Vladimir Putin so presciently predicted that Trump would be able to efficiently accomplish when he threw the support of his hackers and propaganda machine behind the Republican candidate in the last presidential election, Trump continues to try to erode public trust in any news source besides what appears on his Twitter feed or his defacto state media arm, Fox News.
The realization that we still have a president in office who is this ignorant, vindictive, and malicious is an extremely depressing thought that can often remind one of the lyrics of the late Canadian singer/songwriter and poet Leonard Cohen in his song “Dress Rehearsal Rag”:
“That’s right, it’s come to this,
Yes it’s come to this,
And wasn’t it a long way down,
Wasn’t it a strange way down?”
At times like this, music can provide some solace, but the sad truth of Cohen’s lyrics won’t erase the reality that we must face and change as soon as we can in our efforts to get America back to being the land of the free and the home of the brave instead of the dystopian nightmare that Trump has rendered it.
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Vinnie Longobardo is the Managing Editor of Occupy Democrats. He's a 35-year veteran of the TV, mobile & internet industries, specializing in start-ups and the international media business. His passions are politics, music, and art.