Trump hearts Arpaio
Trump. This morning. He retweeted a cartoon of a train killing a reporter. Haha. It’s one of his funny jokes, you see. Haha. If only all the reporters were dead, so that all we knew about Trump would come from his own PR team. Haha. So funny.
President Trump has retweeted a cartoon of a train bearing the Trump logo killing a CNN reporter, just days after a protester at a white-nationalist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, was fatally run down by a driver who participated in that rally. The cartoon reads “Fake news can’t stop the Trump train.” In July, Trump shared a GIF of himself beating the CNN logo to a pulp. Thirty minutes after promoting the cartoon at 7 a.m. Tuesday, it was deleted from Trump’s Twitter feed.
Thirty minutes too late, because we’ve seen it now.
Here’s something else he retweeted, and this one is still there.
FOX NEWS EXCLUSIVE: President Trump 'seriously considering' a pardon for ex-Sheriff Joe Arpaio https://t.co/Rgw8l7i9Xl
— FOX & friends (@foxandfriends) August 14, 2017
He’s thinking about pardoning Joe Arpaio, whom Fox & friends calls the “colorful” former Arizona sheriff. No, he wasn’t a “colorful” sheriff, he was a sadistic sheriff who got away with it for years. NBC News takes a more sober view of him.
Critics said the pardon would be an endorsement of racism and further hypocrisy on the part of the president and blasted Trump for “attempting to lionize” Arpaio by calling him a ‘great American patriot’ despite his racial profiling of Latinos…
Arpaio is facing sentencing in October following his conviction on criminal contempt of court. A federal judge found Arpaio willfully disobeyed orders to stop arresting immigrants solely on the suspicion that they were in the country illegally. Before that, Arpaio had also been found to be ignoring court orders to stop racially profiling and illegally detaining Latinos.
So this is his poke in the eye to the rest of us for the fact that he was forced to pretend to condemn racism yesterday. This is his “Hahahaha I didn’t mean a word of it, suckers. If you force me to pretend I hate racism I’ll just do something extra racist an hour later.”
Salvador Reza, a Phoenix community organizer, said in a statement that Trump was throwing a bone to Nazi and Ku Klux Klan supporters after being forced to condemn them.
“He is also sending a signal to law enforcement nationwide that they can disobey a federal judge and disregard the constitution, whenever the victims are racially profiled for their ethnicity, color of skin or national origin,” said Reza.
Cecilia Wang, deputy legal director at the American Civil Liberties Union, said if Trump follows through, he would be pardoning Arpaio’s “flagrant violation of federal court orders that prohibited the illegal detention of Latinos.”
“Make no mistake,” said Wang, “this would be an official presidential endorsement of racism.”
Official and conspicuous and advertised – by Trump, on Twitter. He’s letting us know. He wants to make sure we know. Mr Birther, Mr Kill the Central Park 5, Mr They’re all rapists, Mr Many sides, many sides – he wants to make damn sure we know. Trump despises brown and black people and he wants us to be in no doubt about that.
“He has done a lot in the fight against illegal immigration. He’s a great American patriot and I hate to see what has happened to him,” Fox reported Trump said of Arpaio.
He wants to be very sure we know.
Regarding the cartoon, I would not call it an image of a reporter being killed by a train. The reporter is actually trying to slow or stop the train, arms spread out, feet plowing railroad ties as he is pushed down the line by the train. The original ( http://www.indystar.com/story/opinion/columnists/varvel/2017/01/13/cartoonist-gary-varvel-stopping-trump-train/96534086/ , dated Jan.13, 2017, from which this has been modified) shows the Dem Donkey trying to stop the Trump train. Again the donkey is trying (vainly) to stop the train. In real life we know that this is not possible and attempting such would result in death. Cartoon physics allows the use of unrealistic images like this to make a point, in this case the vanity and hopelessness of trying to stop the inevitable (Trump’s inauguration, in the modified version the inability of the press to prevent Trump from communicating his message directly to the American people). I can understand the vigilance and heightened sensitivity to images of people, particularly those in the media, depicted in front of fast moving vehicles, but I would characterise the original as comic exaggeration and hyperbole rather than threat or intimidation.
That’s my take on it, anyhow.
But why would Trump retweet a cartoon that meant that? Why would someone slightly less infantile then delete it half an hour later?
The original may have meant that, but I don’t think it makes much sense to read this one that way.
Is he allowed to delete tweets? I thought there was something about his own account now officially representing the Presidency and he couldn’t technically block people or delete tweets etc – or rather that there was a movement afoot to decide whether this was the case, but I’ve not heard anything about it for a while.
Dave, I know there was something in Congress for that, but I don’t know if it passed. The thing is, what can they really do? Trump has decided he is above the law, and he is in the office that is charged with enforcing the law, so it seems likely the only real way to make him obey the law is to go to impeachment, and they seem reluctant to do that.
I think if Trump actually ran over a reporter, they might consider impeachment, but I think it might still be very hard to get the votes necessary, if Trump supporters still loved him (and they would love him more for that, I have little doubt).
I’ve seen talk about the claim that he can’t block people…not so much that he can’t delete tweets. Anyway of course it’s wholly futile: people get screengrabs the instant he tweets.
I believe the argument about deleting tweets is that, at least the ones coming from the official POTUS account (possibly his RealDonaldTrump account, too, but I’m not sure about that) are covered by the Presidential Records Act and are required to be preserved. Even if that’s true, “preserved” may simply mean that somebody, somewhere in the government has a copy; it doesn’t necessarily mean you can’t delete tweets from the account itself. I assume the White House is allowed to update its website from time to time and delete outdated pages, as long as they’re archived somehow.
The “government officials can’t block people” theory I think relies on a First Amendment theory, and is a separate thing altogether.
Oh, right, I guess I did see that after all.
Not sure if someone already pointed this out, but DJT also apparently quickly deleted the retweet of a message in which he was called a facist: https://twitter.com/MikeHolden42