Trump plays in the sewer. Why did Lightfoot jump in?
Twitter is the open sewer in which President Donald Trump loves to play.
And now he’s trying to use his presidential pen to regulate that filthy playpen of his.
But he’s Trump, not Hercules. Cleaning that sewer is beyond his regulatory powers. Despite what he may wish to believe, he’s no demigod. He can’t redirect a river to run through it. If he did, he’d wash himself away.
Instead, he splashes around in the disgusting muck of Twitter at all hours. Mostly he attacks enemies, the Democrats and their Beltway media handmaidens, who for three years pushed that bogus Russia collusion investigation probe that found no Russia collusion.
We get the rage. But by using the Twitter platform the way he does, he demeans the presidency. It’s as if he’s one of those mean girl trolls who live to humiliate people. That is, if mean girls had nukes.
Trump isn’t a teenager, nor is he a lefty pajama boy in a fuzzy pink hat living in the basement of mommy’s house. He’s in our house. The White House. He’s president of the United States.
He issued a recent incendiary tweet about the rioters and looters in Minneapolis tearing up the city after a white cop, Derek Chauvin, killed George Floyd, an African American man, by choking him with his knee. Twitter flagged Trump’s tweet for glorifying violence.
“These THUGS are dishonoring the memory of George Floyd, and I won’t let that happen. Just spoke to Governor Tim Walz and told him that the Military is with him all the way. Any difficulty and we will assume control but, when the looting starts, the shooting starts. Thank you!”
When the looting starts, the shooting starts? Will Trump next channel the late Chicago Mayor Richard J. Daley’s “shoot to kill” order?
Arson, riots and looting TVs aren’t legitimate protest. To say so is foolish, irresponsible sophistry. President Barack Obama also condemned what he called “thugs and criminals” in reference to rioters in Baltimore in another police death case. But Obama was silky. Trump is not. And Obama didn’t have crazy Twitter thumbs.
The president is now formally at war with Twitter. Big Tech shapes much of our public speech and has become a Ministry of Truth of sorts. He’ll use all this to rally his base. But he weakens himself.
Trump’s coarseness and rage might sound tough. But tough guys I’ve known never raise their voice. They don’t have to.
Recently, he went after a critic he loathes, MSNBC commentator Joe Scarborough. Trump retweeted a wild conspiracy theory that the former Congressman was somehow involved in a former staffer’s death.
“A lot of interest in this story about Psycho Joe Scarborough,” Trump tweeted. “So a young marathon runner just happened to faint in his office, hit her head on his desk, & die? I would think there is a lot more to this story than that? An affair? What about the so-called investigator? Read story!”
That was reprehensible, without honor. This was the smear of a gossip, not a president.
Scarborough has pushed his own wild theories about Trump and Russia, and suggested Trump is insane. But here the president supports Scarborough’s case. Because what Trump did with Scarborough debases the White House. And that is crazy.
I get it. Trump uses Twitter to speak directly to the American people, rather than have his words shaped by Beltway media that has proved it despises him. I use Twitter too. I often wish I didn’t have to, but it is a painful fact of life for a writer. Yet after using it, I reach for the hand sanitizer.
As I was writing this, Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot decided to splash around in the same political sewer as Trump.
She’s worried about the violence here. She’s admitted that Chicago homicides and shootings are out of control. She has problems with her cops.
Meanwhile, panicky Illinois Democrats are begging for a federal bailout for that $140 billion unfunded public worker pension hole they have dropped taxpayers into.When this Ponzi scheme collapses, Democrats don’t want to wear the jacket.
So, even as she’s desperate for federal help, what did Lightfoot do? She played the Trump card to rally her own base.
“His goal is to polarize, to destabilize local government and inflame racist urges,” Lightfoot said on Friday with her mouth, not her thumbs, about Trump. “… And I will code what I really want to say to Donald Trump. It’s two words. It begins with F and it ends with U.”
I like Lori and supported her campaign in this column. And the witless will applaud her. But someone should whisper to her — if they dare — that she’s really not some tough-talking fictional character like Tugboat Annie or Yara Greyjoy from “Game of Thrones.” She’s mayor of Chicago. And when she rolls in the mud, she coarsens herself and demeans her office, as Trump has done.
F and U? Really?
Trump doesn’t care about Illinois. He’s a transactional man and knows he has little political chance here.
But in Illinois and across the country, tens of millions of jobs have been lost due to the state-by-state coronavirus shutdown of commerce.
It was a great economy, once. Now millions of those jobs will never return. We haven’t seen the worst of this.
In November, voters will select a president based on which candidate they believe will bring the economy back.
If Trump loses the election in November to a half-lucid Joe Biden, he can blame his Twitter fetish. But then it will be too late to lop off those Twitter thumbs by presidential decree.