TWITTER STORM DAMAGE TAKING A GROWING TOLL
Stop him before he tweets again.
Please, Mr. President, put down that smartphone. I’m begging you.
I know, everyone else is begging you too, but a lot of the overstuffed empty suits harrumphing at you yesterday were Never-Trumpers, and you just know they were relishing another chance to go on cable TV and say I-told-ya-so.
Paul Ryan, Susan Collins, Lindsey Graham, Ben Sasse — this means you.
But damn, Mr. President, even those of us who usually look forward to your early-morning tweet barrages are putting our gloves up to our faces and muttering, “No mas.”
Sliding into the very long Independence Day week(end), did we really need this COVFEFE?
Until 9:58 a.m. yesterday morning, the week was going so great that I was almost getting tired of winning. Oh sure, Mr. President, the Obamacare repeal is a big mess in Congress, but that’s not really your fault.
ISIS is finally being ousted from Mosul, Jeff Zucker is on the ropes at the Fake News Network, the travel ban is going into effect, Crazy Bernie’s wife is in a photo finish with a federal grand jury, acting FBI Director Andrew McCabe is busted red-handed violating the Hatch Act, the insufferable Susan Rice is being subpoenaed to testify under oath about the dirty tricks operation called “unmasking” — in short, everything was falling into place.
And then you send out
those goofy tweets about Morning Joe and Mika. And suddenly all the stuffed Beltway shirts like George Will and Bill Kristol are back to tut-tutting about “civility” and “tone” and “beneath the dignity of the office.”
Your tweets let them change the subject. The alt-left was on the ropes and you let them get away. This is what the Sunday chat shows will obsess about now, rather than Fake News.
Mr. President, with those silly tweets you forgot the first rule of public fights: don’t punch down.
You said you don’t watch Morning Joe anymore, but that just raises the question: then why are so bent out of shape?
I understand why you don’t like them. I get it. They’re ingrates. They used to suck up to you. I’ve seen Morning Joe with my own eyes, loitering around the patio bar at Mar-a-Lago, looking like the banjo boy in “Deliverance,” sucking down your top-shelf booze during Christmas 2015.
I saw the lovebirds again in Palm Beach last New Year’s Eve. You couldn’t miss them. Morning Joe was the only male on the grounds, including waiters and busboys, who wasn’t wearing a tuxedo. Again, sad! Very sad.
But so what? Morning Joe is a pimple on the rear end of progress. Everybody in the country is laughing about fake news, and look who one of his sidekicks is — Mike Barnicle.
I mean, Mike Barnicle was fake news before there was fake news. But hey, in the big picture, a tweet is just 140 characters under the dam. So let me put it another way:
Is there anything Donald Trump could ever tweet out that would make you wish Hillary Clinton were president instead of him?
I can answer that with 137 characters to spare.
No.