• One Trump fundraising event in Dallas next month has a price tag of $580,600 per couple.

Impeached president Donald Trump is scheduled to headline in-person fundraisers as early as June, which would be his first since the coronavirus outbreak stopped campaign events in March. Read the rest

Donald Trump on Friday afternoon claimed to be completely ignorant of the racist history of the phrase 'when the looting starts, the shooting starts,' which he tweeted, and the White House retweeted, and which was also posted on the Presidential Facebook account. Read the rest

Impeached President Donald Trump announced on a Friday afternoon in the middle of a pandemic that has killed more than 100,000 that he is terminating the relationship between the United States and the World Health Organization. Read the rest

It's easy to become inured to Trump's ceaseless depravity, which is why I'm glad I read Joe Scarborough's Op-Ed in The Washington Post about Trump's sociopathic obsession about a false story that is causing great pain to a dead woman's family.

One is a politician so obsessed with a morning cable news show that he has sought retribution by repeatedly defaming a dead woman’s memory.

The other is a soft-spoken Air Force engineer who has worked on projects for 32 years with the singular goal of protecting and defending the United States. The 6-foot-3 Florida resident is still mourning the death of a wife he lost 19 years ago. He holds on to cherished memories of Lori Klausutis as a lifelong Republican, a devoted Catholic who sang in her church choir and an avid runner so perpetually cheerful that people called her “Little Miss Mary Sunshine.” After Lori’s death, T.J. Klausutis returned alone to the home the couple had just bought in Niceville, Fla., and faced an almost immediate barrage of Internet conspiracy theories about the “murder” of his wife.

The pace of those hateful lies ebbed and flowed with the years, until they swelled recently into a slimy tsunami of bilge spewing from President Trump’s 80-million-strong Twitter feed. I have never been able to grasp Trump’s bizarre fixation with “Morning Joe,” but that sad obsession has driven him to weaponize Lori’s memory in an attempt to settle some perceived grievance against me. Or perhaps to deflect from the 100,000 Americans lost to a disease he once dismissed as “one person coming in from China.”

Twitter last night hid one of President Trump's tweet behind a warning, saying that it broke the company's policy against glorifying violence. In the tweet, Trump branded protestors in Minneapolis 'THUGS' and suggested they should be shot.

....These THUGS are dishonoring the memory of George Floyd, and I won’t let that happen. Just spoke to Governor Tim Walz and told him that the Military is with him all the way. Any difficulty and we will assume control but, when the looting starts, the shooting starts. Thank you!

Floyd was an unarmed black man killed by Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin. Minneapolis has seen two nights of unrest as local authorities refuse to release unredacted footage of the incident or to charge Chauvin with a crime. "Thug" is a storied euphemism for black people.

The warning notice comes three days after Twitter placed a fact-check warning on another of Trump's tweets and a day after Trump signed an executive order denouncing the company.

'A riot is the language of the unheard.' —Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King

UPDATE: Trump posted it again, from the official White House account, and Twitter has applied the same warning to it.

Read the rest

Donald Trump is threatening a Twitter employee, on Twitter, just after Jack Dorsey tweeted to leave his employees out of this. The drama continues. Read the rest

Today, Trump will announce his executive order against social media companies, the day after Twitter added a fact-checking note to two of Trump's misleading tweets. Surprising nobody, Trump's draft order goes after Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act of 1996 that is an essential protection for free speech on the Internet. (Here's the EFF's explanation of Section 230.) From CNN:

"In a country that has long cherished the freedom of expression, we cannot allow a limited number of online platforms to hand-pick the speech that Americans may access and convey online," the draft order says. "This practice is fundamentally un-American and anti-democratic. When large, powerful social media companies censor opinions with which they disagree, they exercise a dangerous power."

[...]

Under the order, the Commerce Department would ask the Federal Communications Commission for new regulations clarifying when a company's conduct might violate the good faith provisions of Section 230 -- potentially making it easier for tech companies to be sued.

That is consistent with a draft order whose text CNN first reported last summer -- and which prompted FCC officials to push back on the plan privately.

The draft order instructs the Justice Department to consult with state attorneys general on allegations of anti-conservative bias. It bans federal agencies from advertising on platforms that have allegedly violated Section 230's good-faith principles.

Finally, the draft order would direct the Federal Trade Commission to report on complaints about political bias collected by the White House and to consider bringing lawsuits against companies accused of violating the administration's interpretation of Section 230.

[Update: Shortly after this post, Trump lashed out at Twitter, on Twitter.]

This is huge. Twitter today for the first time labeled a tweet by the President as misleading. Read the rest

Trump and Trump Junior are tweeting accusatory nonsense about the death of a woman, and her widower asked Twitter to delete the hurtful messages because the tweets are in violation of Twitter's terms of service. But Twitter has made it clear that Trump can tweet anything he wishes with impunity, so the best it can do is say “We are deeply sorry about the pain these statements, and the attention they are drawing, are causing the family.”

From AP:

[Timothy J. Klausutis called his wife's] death “the single most painful thing that I have ever had to deal with” and said he feels a marital obligation to protect her memory amid “a constant barrage of falsehoods, half-truths, innuendo and conspiracy theories since the day she died.”

Klausutis said Trump is among the conspiracy theorists spreading “bile and misinformation” on Twitter “disparaging the memory” of his wife and their marriage.

Trump’s tweets violate Twitter’s community rules and terms of service, he said.

“An ordinary user like me would be banished,” Klausutis wrote.

In a statement, Twitter said it was “deeply sorry about the pain these statements, and the attention they are drawing, are causing the family.”

The cruelty is the point. Read the rest

White House adviser Kevin Hassett said the quiet part out loud just now: “Our human capital stock is ready to go back to work.” Read the rest

It's curious, isn't it. It's now 6 months after impeached President Donald Trump said he was starting his 2020 physical.

He hasn't completed the routine medical examination he said he started in November.

The White House won't say why.

I wonder why. Read the rest

Documentary maker Michael Moore was right when he predicted Trump would win the 2016 election, despite most polls favoring Hillary Clinton. Now, Moore is predicting Trump will call off the 2020 election.

Here's what he told Vanity Fair:

“There will be no November 3 election if things keep going the way they’re going right now,” Moore said. “I think he would have figured out a way, even without the coronavirus, but this is a gift to him because I think he never really intended on leaving in the first place. He admires dictators. He admires strongmen, wishes he was one. I think the writing is on the wall right now that he is in deep electoral trouble.”

Image: Jumpstory/CC0 Read the rest

ProPublica reports the administration of Donald Trump has given coronavirus bailout funds to two different elite private jet companies which were owned or founded by individuals who donated to the Trump campaign. Read the rest