Donald Trump's tweets: Are they presidential statements or not? They are the most dissected, repeated and analyzed statements in the world – but are Donald Trump's tweets formal statements by the President of the United States, or his own personal reflections? It seems that no one can agree: even the US Department of Justice, which has represented the short messages from his @ …
IIRC, he announced the ban on transgender recruits in a tweet. And IIRC, the Pentagon did not acknowledge the tweet as an order, and awaited a formal command from the Administration. The courts, on the other hand, have used Mr. Trump's twitter statements as evidence of his intent when evaluating the constitutionality of his various bans on travel from certain countries. Intent is personal, of course, but it is being evaluated as the intent of the President of the United States in his official capacity.
Brief digression, seeing as one poster wrote that Mr. Trump is in early senile dementia. I don't know about that.
I saw "The Dresser" recently. In a special feature on the DVD, Anthony Hopkins mentioned the way he played the character of Sir: he saw a man who had limited understanding of how to live in the mundane, because he was a man with only a life on stage. He had no interior life. Perhaps Mr. Trump is similarly unmoored in reality. He lies without shame, believes whatever is convenient to him, and breaks promises without remorse. Perhaps he has no interior sense of what is right, or what is true.
If he believes there is no unalterable truth, then a good liar -- say, not just an ex-KGB agent but an ex-KGB director -- could skilfully convince Mr. Trump that black is white, as long as it seems advantageous in the moment for Mr. Trump to believe in the whiteness of black... or believe that the very savvy, very controlling leader of Russia would actually not know about the well-documented Russian use of social media to influence American society. And of course a leader who does not believe that there is truth and there are lies, and who is not able or willing to hold to truth when the lies are advantageous to believe -- well, that leader is a danger to whomever he leads.
Believing untruth does not lead to good decision-making. A friend described riding along with his brother, who told him "I've found I can tell when there's an oncoming car even when it's out of sight. I can pass on a curve in perfect safety, don't worry." That's decision-making unmoored from reality.
Guessing about Mr. Trump's psychology is amusing, but really, who knows what's inside his mind?
Whether his tweets are official communications or not, they do reveal a petty, vindictive, and deeply narcissistic individual.
"Perhaps Mr. Trump is similarly unmoored in reality. He lies without shame, believes whatever is convenient to him, and breaks promises without remorse. Perhaps he has no interior sense of what is right, or what is true."
Sounds remarkably similar to the definition of a psychopath.
Twitter is making a fortune off of his ramblings and brings the name of their product free publicity 24/7 all around the world.
Of course they're also tracking his location, mining, logging and selling all of his data to their highest bidders. I'm quite sure it would be easy for Russia/North Korea/whatever country to covertly hack or plant a spy at Twitter HQ and track the morons precise location. It wouldn't take much for NK to bomb him.
Fuckin' moron.
Palpy's first paragraph may nail the issue in a sense. The DoD did not take Donald Trump's tweet on exclusion of transgender individuals from the military personnel pool. That is a significant indication that those in charge of a major executive department do no consider the tweets to be in the category of official action or direction, and hints that maybe they should not be. In addition, I would suggest tentatively that a great many of them probably have no significant policy or executive action content; like another poster, I try to pay as little attention as possible to this sort of nonsense.
As presidential utterances, though, the tweets still probably should be classified as government records for preservation purposes, as they may be useful to later historians. That is not entirely clear either, since not all statements and documents of government officials require preservation. In any case, the legalities are likely to take a while to sort and the fact that Justice takes varying positions in different cases may simply reflect the fact that different cases have different facts and raise different issues, including, for example, that they involve different tweets on different topics or are easier or harder to take as official action.
Two accounts probably would be better than one, but might not be better by much unless they are clearly understood to be "official" and "personal" and limited accurately to that. However, a Twitter account for issuing policy statements or executive direction strikes me as a joke, given the unbearable number of long and turgid official directives and instructions I had to read during a fairly long civil service career.
It's not a joke if he tweets something about keeping $ethnics$ out and the border agent at the airport refuses to let you in. You could debate the finer aspects of constitutional law while pointing out the generally poor historical outcomes of "only obeying orders" - but you still aren't getting in.
> ...a significant indication that those in charge of a major executive department do no consider the tweets to be in the category of official action or direction...
It's only an indication that they know there's enough doubt, so that they can ignore the ones they disagree with (because they're not official), and implement the ones they do agree with (because they're direct from the awful office).
>The DoD did not take Donald Trump's tweet on exclusion of transgender individuals from the military personnel pool. That is a significant indication that those in charge of a major executive department do no consider the tweets to be in the category of official action or direction, and hints that maybe they should not be.
Not really. The DoD are just as likely to hold back on any command they don't quite like - whether verbal, twitted or on parchment.
Methinks she doth protest too much - that the person calling himself The Death Lord of Outer Darkness in social media, is usually some puny weed living in a garage or basement?
So the likelihood that the individual calling him- or itself @realDonaldTrump is actually Donald Trump is minimal. It's probably a gang of unemployed and unemployable Colombian pimps and drug-dealers, issuing tweets in return for private favours from The Chump Himself. I have no ideas just what sort of private favours they might demand from him, because frankly I have no idea just what the 1% get up to with their unemployed and unemployable Colombian pimps and drug-dealers.
"Who knows, but it would strangely fitting if a constitutional crisis was caused over something so shallow as a Twitter account."
But isn't that primarily how a lot of major crisis' occur and evolve; not primarily from massive ground shaking events, but from smaller innocuous and seemingly tenuously linked ones that take time to garner any serious traction; but then end up like an irremovable cyst and having considerable long term unintended ramifications?
The world for the first time in human history can hear spontaneous statements from a world leader. If anyone things worse statements have never been made by American or any other leaders, they are sadly mistaken. Had we hear the private unrehearsed words of Hitler, Roosevelt(s), Mao, Kennedy, LBJ, Reagan, and WJC, we would all universally recognize that this POTUS is different in a far better way. Sadly, this makes no sense to millennial's or leftist ideologues. It would be nice if Americans could discuss problems in society and ways to address them within the confines of the rule-of-law and the US Constitution.
Today's America does not support such an endeavor.
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