Had Joe Scarborough, the early-morning talk-show host, murdered a young female intern twenty years ago? “Maybe or maybe not,” the president tweeted with a regal shrug. He was just asking! Again the mechanics of Twitter exposed him in ways none of his other bad habits do. The tweet couldn’t help him in any conceivable manner beyond the immediate, prurient thrill it must have given him, and it very likely hurts him with the fence-sitting, swing voters who he will need most in November. Repeating the claim served chiefly to demonstrate that his compulsion to strike back at his enemies—any enemy will do—easily overwhelms his ability to make rational calculations about his future.
But how far does he dare go? On Thursday, Trump struck back with an executive order directing his administration to reconsider the special legal protections that enable Twitter and other social media to survive. The statutory exemption from libel suits, for example, has made possible the coruscating eruptions of falsehood and innuendo that keep Twitter going and make it indispensable to so many of the twits. Without the exemption, the company likely wouldn’t continue in anything like its present form. Trump wants to end Twitter as we know it—as he knows it.
Trump is making a strange bet, freighted with ironies that double back on themselves. Nothing—at least this week—would please the president more than to sink Twitter, his newest enemy. And yet nothing would deprive him of more pleasure than losing Twitter, his oldest enabler.
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