What Trump's saying, in essence, is that he objects to purported censorship by social media companies. It's a common complaint on the right after efforts to reduce toxicity and falsehoods led to demotion of accounts and deletion of content. (2/)
It is, in other words, an issue that's not only specific to his base but to a very particular subset of his base. It would be like Biden tweeting "MIXED-USE DEVELOPMENT!" (3/)
A few select quotes from the president whose primary concern is not instilling fear or panic in the American public. washingtonpost.com/politics/2020/…
“I'm the leader of the country, I can't be jumping up and down and scaring people,” Trump told Hannity last night. “I don't want to scare people.”
Like more than a few people, Weijia Jiang was not familiar with Trump’s aborted video from 2012 in which he fires “Obama.” After realizing the background, she deleted a tweet about it.
Because that is how you demonstrate credibility: acknowledging errors.
(1/)
By being mentioned in her tweet, I got a reminder of how things work today.
If you admit error, you acknowledge error. If, on the other hand, you deny making an error? You can try to push every issue into a he-said-she-said battle.
(2/)
If you deny that you were wrong or that you lied or that you had an affair, people who seek to defend you can live in the gray area, however narrow.
If you admit your mistake, as you should and as you might be professionally obligated to do? You allow bad-faith critiques.
(3/)
Here's the video. This was a subplot in 2012 that was pretty well known, but since Trump was just Trump-the-TV-guy at the time, it's understandable that people missed it.
I haven't read Cohen's book, but either he or the person who tweeted the summary above clearly misrepresents a scenario in which Trump was trying to get attention by applying his "Apprentice" shtick to Obama.