Trump Asks Twitter To Ban New York Times, WaPo, Says Both Will Be ‘Out Of Business’ By The Time His Theoretical Second Term Ends

Donald Trump is not an authoritarian, ok?

I mean, why would you even think something like that?

Sure, he demonstrates an almost childlike adoration for dictators (recently going so far as to suggest that he wants “his people” to stand at attention for him the way Kim Jong-Un’s generals stand for him), and yes, he’s fighting tooth and nail to commandeer the nation’s law enforcement and intelligence agencies on the way to making them his own personal Gestapo, but other than that, there are no signs that America is taking steps down the dangerous road to dictatorship.

Well, no signs unless you count Trump threatening to tax Harley-Davidson clean out of business in retaliation for the company’s announcement that it will move some production to Europe in order to retain access to the European market amid the trade frictions.

And unless you count that time he tried to force the U.S. Postmaster General to double shipping rates on Amazon in retaliation for the negative coverage he receives from the Washington Post.

And unless you count his tweets from last month about encouraging WaPo journalists to go on strike so “we would get rid of Fake News for an extended period of time!”

Ok, wait, on second thought, he’s an autocrat.

And he reinforced that on Saturday morning with the following characteristically egregious tweet that references Twitter’s fake account purge:

https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/1015586529484443648

I’m not sure I have ever seen so much irony crammed into 280-characters.

As the Washington Post reported on Friday, “Twitter’s growing campaign against bots and trolls – coming despite the risk to the company’s user growth – is part of the ongoing fallout from Russia’s disinformation offensive during the 2016 presidential campaign, when a St. Petersburg-based troll factory was able to use some of America’s most prominent technology platforms to deceive voters on a mass scale to exacerbate social and political tensions.”

So this is Donald Trump, encouraging Twitter to cite the very policies put in place to prevent the type of activity that helped get him elected, in the service of banning legitimate news outlets which he despises in large part because of their efforts to uncover and otherwise shed light on the very same shenanigans that prompted Twitter to purge fake accounts in the first place.

And then, to top it off, he’s claiming the New York Times and the Washington Post will be “out of business in 7 years”, which seems like a rather arbitrary timeline to put on things, unless of course it’s not in fact arbitrary.

Think on that.

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One thought on “Trump Asks Twitter To Ban New York Times, WaPo, Says Both Will Be ‘Out Of Business’ By The Time His Theoretical Second Term Ends

  1. I admit it sounds ludicrous to be having such thoughts about the US of A, but it’s as well to keep in mind that Adolf H. was democratically elected.

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