Trump 52: Now He's The FORMER President! (And Still Impeached Twice)

[GreyhoundFan]

41 minutes ago, onekidanddone said:

No way he is getting there that early. Those foolish souls are going to be standing there for a very long time 

He may send warm up acts like Faisons 1&2 and Kim the screamer. Maybe Rudy will make an appearance before he goes back in his cave for the day.

[AmazonGrace]

How do you estimate the odds that Trump knows who all these people are?

Quite a weird collection of random people, incl. George Washington, Billy Graham, Alex Trebek and Whitney Houston.

Edited January 18, 2021 by AmazonGrace

[Alisamer]

1 hour ago, onekidanddone said:

No way he is getting there that early. Those foolish souls are going to be standing there for a very long time 

Considering it's Trump, he'll probably time the actual wheels-up departure for 11:59 so it'll distract from the inauguration and he can continue to bilk the taxpayers for every possible second. 

10 minutes ago, AmazonGrace said:

How do you estimate the odds that Trump knows who all these people are?

Quite a weird collection of random people, incl. George Washington, Billy Graham, Alex Trebek and Whitney Houston.

What a strange collection of people! I hope they do action figures of all of them. I wonder how they'll sort them for the displays? Chronologically? Put all the entertainers together, all the inventors together, etc? It would be pretty cool to see Steve Jobs hanging out with the Wright brothers and Bell. 

And I wonder who managed to sneak RBG onto that list...

[GreyhoundFan]

22 minutes ago, Alisamer said:

Considering it's Trump, he'll probably time the actual wheels-up departure for 11:59 so it'll distract from the inauguration and he can continue to bilk the taxpayers for every possible second. 

I'm guessing he has them timing it so he lands in Palm Beach at that time, because as soon as Biden is sworn in, the plane is no longer Air Force One and he'll want to be pictured exiting AF1. So, in that case, he'd need them to take off before 10. When I fly commercial from National Airport (I refuse to use St. Ronnie's name) to Miami, it's two hours and 40 minutes. AF1 gets priority and Palm Beach is closer, so it's probably about a two hour flight.

[GreyhoundFan]

This is a good op-ed: "Twitter’s Trump ban is even more important than you thought"

Spoiler

The silence is remarkable.

For all that’s happening — President-elect Joe Biden’s inauguration, the threat of right-wing violence, the coronavirus death toll approaching 400,000 — the loudest voice in American life for the past five years has been reduced to a whisper. President Trump is not on Twitter.

On Jan. 8, Twitter’s leadership finally decided that it had had enough of Trump using the platform to spread lies and incite violence and barred him from the service. According to a new Post/ABC News poll, 58 percent of the public supported the move (though that includes 91 percent of Democrats and only 16 percent of Republicans).

But the magnitude of that decision still hasn’t been fully appreciated. The fact that this one social media company decided to shut down this one account might have completely reshaped American politics for the coming few years.

Until 10 days ago, nearly everyone assumed that Trump would be in a unique place for a defeated ex-president, retaining a hold on his party’s base that would make him the axis around which the Republican world revolved.

His opinions would shape the party’s approach to Biden’s presidency. He would make or break Republican officeholders, depending on their loyalty to him. Everyone within the party — especially those who want to run for president themselves in 2024 — would have to grovel before him, just as they have for so long. The GOP would still be Trump’s party, in nearly every sense.

But not anymore.

As much as we’ve talked about Trump’s tweets for all these years, if anything we might have underestimated how central Twitter was to his power. Without it — especially as an ex-president — he’ll be like Samson without his hair, all his strength taken from him.

Twitter was so important to Trump, according to Shannon McGregor, an assistant professor at the Hussman School of Journalism and Media of the University of North Carolina, because of a few critical features of the platform itself and who uses it.

First, “Twitter is the space for political and media elites,” McGregor told me. Facebook has many more users, but journalists are on Twitter constantly, which means that when Trump spoke there, he was speaking to them.

So even if Facebook lets Trump back on (it, too, banned him, but so far only through the inauguration), that won’t give him the ability to send a missive and then sit back as one news organization after another runs stories about it, multiplying its effects. “Whatever he said on Twitter ended up on the news,” McGregor said. According to research McGregor conducted but hasn’t yet published, when President Barack Obama tweeted during his second term, 3 percent of the time the tweet would find its way into a news story. The figure for Trump’s tweets during his term was 65 percent.

Second, the platform provided him a place to speak uncontested. He could say whatever he wanted without being challenged, at least in the moment.

Third, his Twitter presence enabled him to constantly reinforce an affinity between himself and his supporters by speaking to them not only about politics but also about plenty of other topics.

Trump connected with them “because he was so genuinely himself, for better and for worse, on Twitter,” McGregor told me. They identified with his opinions about everything, whether it was House Speaker Nancy Pelosi or the merits of KFC or the latest celebrity scandal.

“That’s the reason influencers of all stripes are successful, because of that sense of intimacy” that social media can create, McGregor said. And because Twitter is so reactive, “it allowed people to make that connection between him and themselves” as they responded to the news together.

When he’s not president, Trump will have means of speaking to the public — he can call in to “Fox & Friends,” for instance — but he won’t be surrounded by reporters waiting to write down his every word, so he’ll have to work harder to get the attention of the press. Without Twitter, he won’t be able to speak to his people on an hourly basis, maintaining that affinity and crowding out the other Republicans who might compete for their affection.

He could go to some upstart conservative social media platform, like Gab or Parler (if it gets restored). But those don’t have the mainstream legitimacy he craves, and reporters aren’t on them, so their reach is much more limited.

That means that when new events occur, Trump won’t be able to make himself the core of the story. He won’t be able to constantly remind Republicans that they need to fear him. While many of his supporters will remain loyal, others will drift away, not turning against him but just no longer thinking about him every day.

That will create a vacuum into which other Republicans can move as they position themselves for 2024, not because they’re such Twitter ninjas themselves, but because space will have been created for something more like a normal, non-Trump presidential nominating contest.

There are profound questions about the role social media now plays in our political process. I agree both with those who argue that Twitter banning Trump was long overdue (his account was the single most important nexus of misinformation on the entire platform) and that it’s deeply troubling that a private company has this much power.

But, for now, it does. And so one company’s decision to finally say no to a president who used it to inject poison into the American political bloodstream for years has remade the future of the Republican Party, and perhaps the whole country.

Trump will still play a role in his party and in our politics; we won’t shake off this horrific presidency so easily. But that blissful quiet, as we no longer have him shouting in our ears every day? We could get used to that.

 

[GreyhoundFan]

From the "well, DUH" files: "Misinformation dropped dramatically the week after Twitter banned Trump and some allies"

Quote

Online misinformation about election fraud plunged 73 percent after several social media sites suspended President Trump and key allies last week, research firm Zignal Labs has found, underscoring the power of tech companies to limit the falsehoods poisoning public debate when they act aggressively.

The new research by the San Francisco-based analytics firm reported that conversations about election fraud dropped from 2.5 million mentions to 688,000 mentions across several social media sites in the week after Trump was banned from Twitter.

Election disinformation had for months been a major subject of online misinformation, beginning even before the Nov. 3 election and pushed heavily by Trump and his allies.

Zignal found it dropped swiftly and steeply on Twitter and other platforms in the days after the Twitter ban took hold on Jan. 8.

The president and his supporters also have lost accounts on Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, Twitch, Spotify, Shopify and others. Facebook called Trump’s suspension “indefinite” but left open the possibility that the account could later be restored.

The findings, from Jan. 9 through Friday, highlight how falsehoods flow across social media sites — reinforcing and amplifying each other — and offer an early indication of how concerted actions against misinformation can make a difference.

Twitter’s ban of Trump on Jan. 8, after years in which @realDonaldTrump was a potent online megaphone, has been particularly significant in curbing his ability to push misleading claims about what state and federal officials have called a free and fair election on Nov. 3.

Trump’s banishment was followed by other actions by social media sites, including Twitter’s ban of more than 70,000 accounts affiliated with the baseless QAnon ideology, which played a key role in fomenting the Capitol siege on Jan. 6.

“Together, those actions will likely significantly reduce the amount of online misinformation in the near term,” said Kate Starbird, disinformation researcher at the University of Washington. “What happens in the long term is still up in the air.”

Zignal found that the use of hashtags affiliated with the Capitol riot also dipped considerably. Mentions of the hashtag #FightforTrump, which was widely deployed across Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and other social media services in the week before the rally, dropped 95 percent. #HoldTheLine and the term “March for Trump” also fell more than 95 percent.

The research by Zignal and other groups suggests that a powerful, integrated disinformation ecosystem — composed of high-profile influencers, rank-and-file followers and Trump himself — was central to pushing millions of Americans to reject the election results and may have trouble surviving without his social media accounts.

Researchers have found that Trump’s tweets were retweeted by supporters at a remarkable rate, no matter the subject, giving him a virtually unmatched ability to shape conversation online. University of Colorado information science professor Leysia Palen declared in October, after months of research: “Trump’s amplification machine is peerless.”

“Bottom line is that de-platforming, especially at the scale that occurred last week, rapidly curbs momentum and ability to reach new audiences,” said Graham Brookie, director of the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab, which tracks misinformation. “That said, it also has the tendency to harden the views of those already engaged in the spread of that type of false information.”

Trump reportedly has been looking for a new social media home — with public speculation focusing on Parler, Gab or Telegram, all of which are popular with conservative users — but apparently has not yet settled on one. Parler has been offline for most of the week but reportedly is seeking to resume operations after Google and Apple removed it from their app stores because of scant moderation of violent talk. Amazon Web Services suspended Parler, taking it offline.

The left-leaning media watchdog Media Matters for America found that the number of people clicking and sharing content from right-leaning political Facebook pages also fell substantially in the days after Facebook issued its temporary ban of Trump’s account.

Trump and political allies have railed for years against what they call “Big Tech,” alleging bias against conservative voices without providing systematic proof and pushing companies to take a lighter hand in moderating content and punishing violators of policies. Twitter and other platforms cited policies against hate speech, inciting violence and dangerous conspiracy theories in suspending accounts in the aftermath of the Capitol attack.

Disinformation researchers consistently have found that relatively few accounts acted as “superspreaders” during the election, with their tweets and posts generating a disproportionate share of the falsehoods and misleading narratives that spread about election fraud, mail-in ballots and other topics related to the vote.

A study released the week before the presidential election by the Election Integrity Partnership, a consortium of misinformation researchers, found that just 20 conservative, pro-Trump Twitter accounts — including the president’s own @realDonaldTrump — were the original source of one-fifth of retweets pushing misleading narratives about voting.

The Zignal report also found that hashtags and phrases used by QAnon adherents declined over the past week but mentions of it and of its anonymous leader “Q” increased by 15 percent — a finding that could be explained by the coverage and conversation about its role in the attack on the Capitol.

A recent report by Advance Democracy — founded by Daniel J. Jones, a former FBI analyst and Senate investigator who led the review of the CIA’s torture program — found that social media sites had “successfully purged” large amounts of content pushing false claims of election fraud. The report also found “incendiary and implicitly violent narratives continue to spread at the peripheries of the social media platforms we are monitoring.”

This includes using the word “traitors” on Twitter to describe Vice President Pence, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) and Rep. Adam B. Schiff (D-Calif.), chairman of the House Intelligence Committee. One post on the site referring to Pence, whom Trump has repeatedly criticized in recent weeks, showed a dangling noose and the word “TREASON.”

On Tik Tok, Advance Democracy found that supporters of the militia group Three Percenters were implicitly calling for violence in videos, including one that had been viewed 139,000 times. One showed a man saying: “And for all the people saying, ‘It’s un-American. It’s an act of terrorism.' How do you think we started this country?”

 

[AmazonGrace]

Trump never got 50% approval in the Gallup poll.

https://news.gallup.com/poll/328637/last-trump-job-approval-average-record-low.aspx

Happy MLK day.

The highlights here:

Except the Covid victims who weren't that important to Trump and the people his administration fought hard to have executed.

Edited January 18, 2021 by AmazonGrace

[onekidanddone]

3 hours ago, AmazonGrace said:

How do you estimate the odds that Trump knows who all these people are?

Quite a weird collection of random people, incl. George Washington, Billy Graham, Alex Trebek and Whitney Houston.

Shocked he isn’t on the list

[PreciousPantsofDoom]

4 hours ago, AmazonGrace said:

T

I did a quick skim of that 1776 Commission report from the tweet  @AmazonGrace shared above.  Holy shit!  I keep typing descriptions of how bad the propaganda is in it and then deleting because Im not quite capturing how insane it is. WTF!  And why release this garbage now?

[Ozlsn]

13 minutes ago, PreciousPantsofDoom said:

I did a quick skim of that 1776 Commission report from the tweet  @AmazonGrace shared above.  Holy shit!  I keep typing descriptions of how bad the propaganda is in it and then deleting because Im not quite capturing how insane it is. WTF!  And why release this garbage now?

I am torn between gasping and laughing. Yay for the History Wars, not.

The "if I were one of the historians associated with this I would retire and change my name" made me laugh out loud. And yet, Windschuttle keeps on - and unfortunately I think his brand of reactionary conservative historian has been fully promoted during Trumps tenure.

"I mean God Damn people, I know you've heard of the Civil War, this fucking thing references it and keeps throwing out Lincoln quotes like it's a Mardi Gras float launching beads."

Edited January 19, 2021 by Ozlsn

[Ozlsn]

So from Heather Cox Richardson's Letters From An American:

"There is a lot of chatter tonight about the release today of the 1776 Report guidelines on American history. This is the administration’s reply to the 1619 Project from the New York Times, which focused on America’s history of racism. As historian Torsten Kathke noted on Twitter, none of the people involved in compiling today’s 41-page document are actually historians. They are political scientists and Republican operatives who have produced a full-throated attack on progressives in American history as well as a whitewashed celebration of the U.S.A. Made up of astonishingly bad history, this document will not stand as anything other than an artifact of Trump’s hatred of today’s progressives and his desperate attempt to wrench American history into the mythology he and his supporters promote so fervently."

Given how gobsmackingly awful the bits I read sounded I am vaguely relieved to know that it was compiled by a partisan set of hacks with no history training (or knowledge).

I also read this bit and just rolled my eyes.

"He is issuing orders that Biden vows to overturn, and contemplating pardons (stories say those around him are selling access to him to advocate for those pardons), but otherwise today was quiet."

Of course they are. Tell us about that whole swamp concept again...

[AmazonGrace]

Lawrence O'Donnell was saying Trump could issue secret pardons that no one knows about until the person gets charged. I don't understand how that could be legal?!?  

[WiseGirl]

 

[AmazonGrace]

Mike Lindell vs. Fred Trump. 

[Becky]

OMG, you guys, only ONE  MORE DAY! I am giddy today.  

I keep bouncing back and forth between "I hope the media completely ignore his sorry-ass going away party" and "I hope they show his sorry-ass going away party and there is nobody there!"  

 

[Botkinetti]

Canadian here. I can’t believe how relieved I feel that tomorrow your country will have a president that doesn’t lie on a regular basis and actually understands your constitution and his role. 

[Topaz]

1 hour ago, Becky said:

OMG, you guys, only ONE  MORE DAY! I am giddy today.  

I keep bouncing back and forth between "I hope the media completely ignore his sorry-ass going away party" and "I hope they show his sorry-ass going away party and there is nobody there!"  

 

I keep starting to sing One Day More from Les Mis and then shutting myself up because that song is exactly what we don’t want to see tomorrow.

[Destiny]

18 minutes ago, Topaz said:

I keep starting to sing One Day More from Les Mis and then shutting myself up because that song is exactly what we don’t want to see tomorrow.

I mean, the one more day till we nip this in the bud part is good. 

Disclaimer: I've been doing the same. 

[AnywhereButHere]

Oh great. Now I'm singing it too. We'll have a chorus to rival Broadway soon (as long as someone mutes my microphone...)!

[Shrubbery]

10 hours ago, Ozlsn said:

So from Heather Cox Richardson's Letters From An American:

"There is a lot of chatter tonight about the release today of the 1776 Report guidelines on American history. This is the administration’s reply to the 1619 Project from the New York Times, which focused on America’s history of racism. As historian Torsten Kathke noted on Twitter, none of the people involved in compiling today’s 41-page document are actually historians. They are political scientists and Republican operatives who have produced a full-throated attack on progressives in American history as well as a whitewashed celebration of the U.S.A. Made up of astonishingly bad history, this document will not stand as anything other than an artifact of Trump’s hatred of today’s progressives and his desperate attempt to wrench American history into the mythology he and his supporters promote so fervently."

Given how gobsmackingly awful the bits I read sounded I am vaguely relieved to know that it was compiled by a partisan set of hacks with no history training (or knowledge).

I am a Historian, I feel personally offended by this. But we knew how he treated the sciences, why should other academic subjects fare any better?

[Giraffe]

https://people.com/politics/tiffany-trump-engaged/
 

Tiffany got engaged. I’m so happy she isn’t getting much attention on this (yet). Hopefully it’s a predictor of Trump family coverage to come. 

[Dandruff]

6 hours ago, Becky said:

I keep bouncing back and forth between "I hope the media completely ignore his sorry-ass going away party" and "I hope they show his sorry-ass going away party and there is nobody there!" 

I want to see the sorry-ass going away party.  I'm sure he'll hate it and I'm curious who will actually show up.

17 minutes ago, Giraffe said:

https://people.com/politics/tiffany-trump-engaged/

Tiffany got engaged. I’m so happy she isn’t getting much attention on this (yet). Hopefully it’s a predictor of Trump family coverage to come. 

I'm wondering if this is intended as distraction.  Who knows what may be going on at the WH behind that fluffy announcement.  Am thinking it may not be insignificant that the engagement occurred while Trump still has presidential power. 

[Alisamer]

2 minutes ago, Dandruff said:

I'm wondering if this is intended as distraction.  Who knows what may be going on at the WH behind that fluffy announcement.  Am thinking it may not be insignificant that the engagement occurred while Trump still has presidential power. 

If it'd been announced a week or two ago I'd have assumed that they'd also announce the wedding date as being tomorrow morning at 11 am, at the White House, of course. Creating a massive distraction and splitting resources while tying up staff to prepare for the wedding rather than the transition of moving in the Bidens and moving out the Trumps.

If it'd been Ivanka, that's what would have happened. 

Unfortunately for Tiffany she probably has to remind her father she exists. I wonder if he's mad she didn't get engaged early enough to create a White House wedding media circus/reality TV special/attention grab/grifting opportunity?

[Shrubbery]

5 minutes ago, Dandruff said:

I want to see the sorry-ass going away party.  I'm sure he'll hate it and I'm curious who will actually show up.

Reading between the lines on CNN, I wonder if anyone has RSVP‘ed yes yet? Well I guess Rudy might have, but where Rudy will actually end up being tomorrow morning is anyone‘s guess - I suppose there is no „Joint Base Plumbing“ or similar business in Washington?

[AmazonGrace]

 

He shouldn't have fired Bannon.