Trump’s Lies, Threats, Abuses: Is That Winning ? | National Review
In the Age of Trump, Republicans call that winning, which is not exactly the right word.
President Trump, incensed that Twitter has put B.S. labels on a couple of his B.S. tweets not the ones claiming Joe Scarborough murdered a woman, bizarrely enough retreated into Generalissimo Walter Mitty mode, that thing he does where he postures like an autocratic tyrant and then does . . . squat, more or less. If Twitter doesn t get its act together, he threatened, We will strongly regulate, or close them down, a completely empty threat. He then issued a patently unconstitutional and frankly ridiculous executive order purporting to punitively revoke legal protections enjoyed by technology companies (and publications with comments sections, such as National Review) under the Communications Decency Act. But, in spite of the best efforts of Senate Democrats, the First Amendment still stands and remains an operative part of the Bill of Rights. Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey will have a good chuckle and then mix himself another dihydrogen monoxide smoothie.
President Trump, ever the addict, was right back on Twitter, threatening to have the National Guard murder looters in Minneapolis. We don t do censorship in the United States, and we don t do summary executions, either. On Friday, another guest host for Rush Limbaugh allowed that the president s actions were unorthodox or outrageous. We should speak plainly: These are lies and threats and abuses of the president s position. These aren t questions of etiquette. Republicans should stop making excuses for them or stop wrapping themselves in the mantle of patriotism one or the other.
Republicans used to be the freedom people: free speech, free trade, free enterprise, free markets, freedom of religion, freedom of association, free to keep and bear arms. Trump and his partisans too often are the opposite of that: the neo-mercantilism people, the wildly expansive government power people, the Orbán toady people, the total authority people, the people who complain about abuses of presidential power on Monday and think up implausible excuses for them on Tuesday, the people who conflate corporatism with patriotism, the slanderers, the conspiracy goofs, the shut-down-Twitter-if-Twitter-doesn t-do-what-we-want people.
608Our friends on talk radio insist that we