Brief: We Propose A Ban On Mainstream Media
But only for one thing: stop speculating about how somebody’s finally “taming” Trump’s Twitter tendencies. We don’t mean to single out Bloomberg (they’ve been doing some very fine work,) but they painted a very detailed picture about how new White House Chief of Staff John Kelly was not telling Trump to stop Tweeting, but was, at times “offering a different way to say the same thing.”
And it appeared for a little while that Trump’s Tweets had gotten a tad less pugnacious: over a 4 day period Trump used the term “fake news” only once. (And only in the context of not sufficiently praising his accomplishments, not disputing any story.) And he did not hurl a personal insult at any individual. (Although he did throw all of congress under the bus.) And only about 50% of his Tweets ended with an exclamation point! (As compared to about 75% normally).
And then, Monday happened. 5 references to “fake news”, 4 personal attacks, (including an “old favorite” of his: a Democrat (male) “cried like a baby.”) and 4 attacks on “CNN, ABC, NBC, CBS, NYTIMES & WAPO”.
The Tweet that jumped out at us the most was even odder:

And if you click through, you get this message:

Twitter won’t say why it suspended the specific account Trump Retweeted, but in its explanation of why it suspends accounts it says “accounts we suspend are suspended because they are spammy, or just plain fake.”
Leading to a lot of speculation online that the person posting the original Tweet wasn’t a person at all. The Washington Post goes so far as to suggest a Russian bot. In the course of our own research we found this very odd autobiography of the alleged Tweeter on the Tucker Carlson-founded Daily Caller. Other news organizations attempted to contact the source of the original Tweet, all with varying degrees of non-success. According to Heavy, the original Tweet “shared a meme that read ‘Trump fights for us’ and wrote, ‘Trump working hard for the American people…..thanks❤🇺🇸.’”
Now, we’ve Retweeted people we don’t know on occasion, especially when they’ve said nice things about us, so why are we taking the President to task? Because he’s the President. Because he’s appointed himself arbiter of what’s “fake” and what ain’t. Because how’s he supposed to track down leakers in his administration if he can’t even police his own Twitter feed? Do I need to keep going…?
(This story originally appeared in “The Chaos Report” Newsletter. Please subscribe: https://thechaosreport.com/subscribe/?scr=Medium)

