Trump’s new ZTE tweets trump old ZTE tweets United States president Donald Trump has again tried to clarify just what he meant when he tweeted about protecting jobs at Chinese networking kit-maker ZTE. Trump first tweeted that “President Xi of China, and I, are working together to give massive Chinese phone company, ZTE, a way to get back into business, fast.” But a …
As I understand it (I have no doubt I'll be corrected if I'm wrong) that although a lot of people suffered financially from Trump's bankruptcies, he himself got off relatively lightly.
Then again, it takes a special type of stable genius to lose money running a casino.
Also, the smartest and the healthiest.
Thankfully we have learned that both his previous doctors are entirely trustworthy. The one who looked like he should be high was merely remiss in his professional duties and the one who looked like he has never been high was both remiss in his professional duties and permanently high.
Based on people I knew, they stop being very rational after a while (although there was speed involved too in that case). Although I expect you mean that people doing these drugs are off their heads but still pale beside the sheer chaos of Trump's 'thinking' and I'm missing the point!
"Left side of the brain doesn't know what the right side is doing"
... remove the words "side of the" and you've basically got Zaphod Beeblebrox. As the good book says
"The President is very much a figurehead - he wields no real power whatsoever. He is apparently chosen by the government, but the qualities he is required to display are not those of leadership but those of finely judged outrage. For this reason the President is always a controversial choice, always an infuriating but fascinating character. His job is not to wield power but to draw attention away from it. "
... and we seem to have even got an Eccentrica Gallumbits as well!
. . that it is absolutely unacceptable that a President uses Twitter in any capacity. Whatever a Government is doing or wants to make known should be done through the official spokesperson and not in any other way.
Trump is just unbelievable, in the strictest sense of the word : nothing he says can be taken at face value and anything he does say will likely be contradicted within a day.
For only doing interviews with Fox, after his interview with ABC a year ago when he volunteered the real reason why the fired Comey and basically incriminated himself. He can't control his mouth - look at how he hurt his cause during his half hour long rambling nonsense when he called in to Fox & Friends a couple weeks ago. It was so bad that FOX HOSTS had to hustle him off the phone because they knew he doing himself damage - probably the first time in history a TV show had the president of the United States on the line and wanted to cut it short!
This is why he'd be a fool to agree to an interview with Mueller. He can't stop himself from lying even in cases where he knows what the truth is, and can't stop himself from telling the truth even when he knows it would incriminate him. He's a lawyer's nightmare client, which is why so many lawyers have refused to consider representing him and he's all the way down to the bottom of the barrel with Guliani (who seems to have a similar disease of speaking the truth to Fox even when it will hurt his client)
You can hardly blame him
Well, who should we blame for the favouring? I think there's certainly a case for sueing that most networks are probably too scared to take to court.
If he's only got shit to stay then he should shut up. And Congress should be on his back about this but the spineless chumps are too worried about the mid-terms to do their job.
"Whatever a Government is doing or wants to make known should be done through the official spokesperson and not in any other way."
That's how the civil service bureaucrats would like it. I for one welcome the more direct approach and hope more state figures would pick up the habit. Merkel, May and Macron might get a lot more done just by tweeting more.
@HackerMP
(Oh gosh, who wrote my speech? More, more, more... I sound like an imbecile! On a web forum!)
"It’s not unusual for Trump’s presidential Tweets to contradict policy, cabinet members, or even previous presidential Tweets."
How nicely to mean "dude is terminally insane". I also notice how the "canned statement", if we can call that garbage by this, is split in multiple tweets to accommodate for msg max length.
This is the sign the USA has really gone banana ... I hope they'll recover fast, post Trump, but TBH, I don't see it happen less than 2 decades after ...
Have you been hibernating the last couple years? Ever since Trump seized on the term "fake news" after it was first used to describe the truly fake stuff circulating around Facebook like how Hillary would be dead in six months or whatever he's used it to mean "news that isn't favorable to me".
Someone should write a book about that, because Trump's repurposing of the term 'fake news' to mean almost the opposite of what it once meant has been so successful that it's now hard to remember what it originally did mean. And he did this in weeks. That's actually his most significant achievement.
Its just another way of saying "liberal media bias", which nowadays really means "lack of conservative media bias" - since a heavy conservative bias is the only way to make it look like Trump isn't in real trouble on multiple fronts, all of which Mueller is now apparently investigating. FNC used to be tilted a little conservative in the same way MSNBC was tilted a little liberal. The biases were obvious when you watched their shows, but it mostly came down to what they spent their time discussing - i.e. democratic scandal gets wall to wall coverage on FNC while republican scandal gets only a small mention, the reverse is true on MSNBC. They discussed the same set of facts, it was just their interpretation of those facts which differed.
Once Trump got the nomination, FNC made a major change. They're completely in the tank for Trump, and like him operate on their own set of "alternative facts" that have no basis in the real world. Watching it is like finding yourself in an alternate reality - and I'm sure those who watch FNC all the time probably have the same experience watching MSNBC. But make no mistake, it is Fox that changed, MSNBC reports on the latest news on the Mueller investigation (i.e. treats it as an actual investigation, not a witch hunt that doesn't deserve mention) while FNC focuses on the conspiracy theory of the day and bangs the drums for finding a reason to help Trump obstruct justice by firing Mueller.
It's a year and a half into Trump's term, and you're still following his tweets.
Fire and motion. The tweets are a distraction, in the most literal sense possible. They mean nothing. Less than nothing. Paying attention to them is like staring hard into the conjurer's eyes, thinking he's going to give away his tricks.
Every time you run a story about Trump's tweets, you play his game. This is how he won the election: by saying so much outrageous crap that the media never actually got around to doing any hard work on him, like showing the American public what kind of businessman/politician/leader he really is.
Look at what he does, not what he says. Twitter is not policy.
Look at what he does, not what he says. Twitter is not policy.
Agreed but people are looking at what he does and it is an unholy mess, this is the basis of the article in the Washington Post.
The tweets always play to the base: a bunch of people either too lazy or too stupid to follow the news. But the problem is there is occasionally collateral damage as a result of his off-hand remarks and tweets, which do occasionally get given the status of official comments by the Whitehouse press department.
To date, what exactly has the Trump administration done? Other than piss off pretty much every person on the planet, of course. And Trump's personal high-point: inventing a new word. Shame he forgot what it meant before he could let the rest of us know ...
To date, what exactly has the Trump administration done?
Increased the national debt a lot
Pushed some people out of healthcare
Rolled back environmental and business regulations – lovely drinking water you'll have soon
Fawned to the Israelis and the Saudis
Played a lot of golf at Mar a Lago
It's done a lot: fucked the Paris agreement probably irreperably which will probably result in billions of deaths over the next century; fucked the Iran nuclear deal which will probably result in major wars in the middle east, possibly including nuclear war; fucked numerous trade agreements resulting in increased barriers to trade, increased poverty and probably millions more deaths; destroyed trust in the US ever playing fairly with anyone, essentially handing their role as last superpower standng to China.
Really a lot.
No, don't look at what Trump does, look at what his administration does while everyone's busy getting upset about his tweets.
"Getting upset". Exactly. That's what the tweets are for.
Politicians have always known that journalists are lazy, but Trump has taken it to a whole new level. Conventional politicians just cultivate a few tame journalists and feed them stories, thus allowing the journalist to look informed and insightful without doing any real work.
But Trump - Trump uses Twitter to distract the entire press corps at once. "Following Twitter" is about as cheap and lazy as journalism gets, which means he can rely on just about every media organisation in the world doing it. As long as he continues to generate "things that look like news" in this way - things that can pass for news to enough people that they don't look out of place on the news pages - they will all run it.
Think about what that means. First, the press spend their time talking about what Trump wants them to talk about - which means they have no time left for talking about things he doesn't want them to talk about. The press waste their time picking holes in his positions and logic, which bolsters Trump's narrative of the press all being against him - and is completely meaningless, because he has no intention of following up on any of this crap anyway. And the public's attention is saturated, so we don't notice what his administration is actually doing while he's spraying all this bullshit at us.
Dear journalists: just stop following the tweets. Block him on Twitter. Filter from your newsfeed any story containing the words "Trump" and "Twitter". They have negative information content. Every time you read one, you become slightly stupider, and you're taking the rest of the world down with you.
Hasn't he fired people by tweet while president? If he has then his tweets kind of are policy.
Indeed. While some people like Scott Adams cling to the belief that Trump is a master communicator for many others it looks like what you see is what you get: Trump sees or hears something and comments on it, officially even if this contradicts previous statements or official policy. This does seem to be playing well in America as it bolsters the man of the people image that he's managed to create (a real estate billionaire who owes his fortune in no small degree to stiffing his creditors by declaring bankruptcy), ie. keeping the country in campaign mode is working. Unfortunately, government outside dictatorships such as Russia is about a bit more than campaign slogans and the pettiness of much of Trump's communications is doing lasting damage to US international and trading interests. For example, something that long looked impossible not so long ago, establishing an international payments framework with no US involvement, while still unlikely is definitely being considered. The dollar's hegemony is likely to remain unchallenged for some time yet, but expect bond yields to spike if the Europeans decide to keep trading with Iran. In fact, it was partly because Saddam Hussain talked about selling oil in Euros that the Americans decided to invade.
I have a different interpretation, inspired not by Scott Adams, but by Douglas Adams.
I'm starting to think that maybe he's the "visible" president in a Zaphod Beeblebrox situation, even if he only has one head and two arms. All that remains is to find out who he's a smoke-screen for...
That is the problem, over the decades the USA has slowly given up its manufacturing lead, turning to soft industries instead, like finance, IT etc. and even where US companies "manufacture" hardware, the actual manufacturing takes place off-shore, because the US workforce is too expensive to be competitive, or the quality is too poor.
Obviously there are real craftsmen left in America and producing high quality products, but they are niche. Large US companies producing mass-produced goods aren't doing it at home, so they don't have anything to export, to help boost the balance of trade. That is left to soft sectors, like finance, cloud and software - again large swathes of those have also been offshored.
And now Trump is surprised that they have a huge trade deficit, and Europe and China are to blame? No, it is US policies' fault, over the last 40 years or so.
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