Day 1,225: Trump tries to use unconstitutional executive order, deranged tweets to distract from horrific coronavirus response, job numbers
Donald Trump does not understand the U.S. Constitution. He has never shown any interest in learning about the nation’s most important and powerful document.
That leads to him making embarrassingly unconstitutional decisions, like trying to stem free speech via an executive order, as he did Thursday.
President Donald Trump said he signed an executive order to “defend free speech” from social-media companies by limiting their legal protections from liability — an action he took two days after Twitter applied fact-checking labels to two of his inaccurate tweets about mail-in ballots.
The White House announced Trump’s order seeking to limit legal protections of social-media companies on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram. The text of the order was subsequently made available at this link.
“It’s political theater. It mischaracterizes the law and exceeds executive authority,” Jonathan Peters, a media law professor at the University of Georgia’s Grady College of Journalism and Mass Communication and an affiliate assistant professor with UGA’s School of Law, said in a Twitter post.
Trump’s order is “plainly illegal,” Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.), who coauthored Section 230 of the CDA, said in a statement.
On Thursday, Trump also retweeted far-right lunatics shouting, “The only good Democrat is a dead Democrat,” and screaming himself about the “tragedy”of mail-in voting. (Hypocritically, Trump voted in Florida’s primary in March.)
Yet there are real tragedies in the U.S.
Trump’s executive order and Twitter rants — dangerous as they may be — are meant to distract from his other failures. Job numbers came out Thursday and more than 2 million Americans have filed for unemployment in the past week alone. A quarter of the labor force, more than 40 million people, have now filed for unemployment benefits in the past four months.
Almost everything stems from the coronavirus and the Trump administration’s horrifically ineffective and lackadaisical response.
Joe Biden summarized the state of affairs plainly and effectively.
1,225 days in, 237 to go
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