House of Cards creator pleads with Twitter to delete Donald Trump's account
Beau Willimon, creator of Netflix’s political series House of Cards, countered Donald Trump’s Saturday Twitter rant with one of his own. “Today’s tantrum is just the latest example of why @realDonaldTrump & @POTUS must be removed from @Twitter,” Willimon began a 16-tweet argument.
The writer-producer was referring to Trump alleging over the social media platform that Barack Obama had his “‘wires tapped’ in Trump Tower” before the election. “How low has President Obama gone to tapp my phones during the very sacred election process. This is Nixon/Watergate. Bad (or sick) guy,” the president tweeted from his personal account.
Since the president holds “a supreme and unique responsibility unlike any other user,” Willimon wrote that Trump’s tweets have “real and significant impact on the business of governance, world affairs and national security.” He continued, “President Trump has consistently made misleading claims, attacked the judiciary and threatened sovereign states, the press & public. His tweets recklessly bypass diplomatic channels without consultation from the State Department, [Intelligence Community] or the Pentagon.”
Willimon then deemed Trump’s tweets to be “a national security threat” for “broadcasting to foreign leaders his continuing impulsiveness, recklessness, delusion & ignorance about gov’t,” as well as emboldening “our enemies to take advantage of his flagrant shortcomings.”
Pointing to Trump’s war on mainstream media, which escalated to shutting out specific journalists from a White House press briefing, Willimon added, “Trump makes the argument for himself being a liability to the people” with his “behavior on this service.”
Tweeting directly to Twitter’s official feed, Willimon pleaded, “With your worldwide reach & impact on the media, you have a duty to steer clear of accounts facilitating nat’l security threats. @Twitter is amazing. It connects the world. That comes with its own responsibility: to do your part in protecting that world.”
According to a national survey released by Quinnipiac University in January, 64 percent of Americans said they want Trump’s Twitter account deleted. In the past, POTUS used the platform to bash and discredit media outlets, target politicians and the judge who blocked his travel ban, and slamming Arnold Schwarzenegger and Celebrity Apprentice, among other things.
WHAT TO MAKE OF DONALD TRUMP’S EARLY-MORNING WIRETAP TWEETS
Between six and six-thirty this morning, the President of the United States, who had returned to his Mar-a-Lago estate, in Florida, unleashed a series of tweets accusing his predecessor of tapping his phones just before Election Day: “a new low!” “This is Nixon/Watergate. Bad (or sick) guy!” Two hours later, he tweeted again, this time about Arnold Schwarzenegger’s decision to leave “The New Celebrity Apprentice”: “Sad end to great show.”
Donald Trump’s early-morning Twitter binge unleashed, as he likely expected it would, a flurry of comments on the same medium, with his partisans echoing his rage at Barack Obama while many others questioned Trump’s motives, his integrity, and his mental stability.
Others pointed to articles posted on Breitbart as a possible inspiration; it would not be the first time that Trump has been moved to action by something published on Breitbart, the former home of his close adviser Steve Bannon. One of the articles is based on Senator Orrin Hatch’s remark about the wiretaps that led to the downfall of Michael Flynn as the national-security adviser. Another is based on Mark Levin, a conservative radio host, who recently accused Obama of “police state” tactics to carry out a “silent coup” against Trump.
One of President Trump’s most consistent rhetorical maneuvers is a fairly basic but often highly effective one—the diversionary reverse accusation. When he is accused of benefitting from “fake news,” he flips the neologism on its head; suddenly CNN, the Times, and the rest are “fake news.” When Democratic politicians such as Chuck Schumer and Nancy Pelosi call for investigations of his campaign’s contacts with Russian officials, Trump posts pictures of those critics meeting publicly with Vladimir Putin and calls for an investigation. This happened on Saturday. He fogs the language and clouds the issue.
The stories on Breitbart appear to be related to the efforts of American intelligence and law-enforcement officials to investigate potential links between Trump aides and Russian officials. It would seem that Trump, in the same spirit of diversion, has conflated the work of the courts, law enforcement, and intelligence agencies with “Obama.”
As Benjamin Rhodes, the former deputy national-security adviser under Obama, put it in a tweet on Saturday, the President is not authorized to order a wiretap.
Ironically, the Obama Administration, after being informed that the Russian government was likely behind the hack of the Democratic National Committee and that the effort was intended to undermine Hillary Clinton, did not act more forcefully for fear of appearing to favor its own political party.
And there is other news as well. Trump, who for years has paid compliments to Putin’s strength and tactics, is expected to appoint as his main adviser on Russia Fiona Hill, a think-tank analyst who has described the Russian President as a gangster. Many members of the foreign-policy community in Washington are stunned. They wonder how Hill could take such a post when the Trump Administration is under scrutiny for its relations with Russian officials.
A dual citizen of the United States and the United Kingdom, Hill is a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, in Washington, and between 2006 and 2009 served as a Russia analyst on the National Intelligence Council, a kind of intelligence think-tank independent of the C.I.A. Hill is the co-author, with Clifford G. Gaddy, of a political and psychological portrait of the Russian President titled “Mr. Putin: Operative in the Kremlin.” The book describes Putin’s system as a “protection racket” in which he views himself as the “CEO of Russia, Inc.” and is served by “crony oligarchs.” “In reality,” Hill and Gaddy write, “his leadership style is more like that of a mafia family Don.”
Hill and Gaddy describe in detail Putin’s background as an intelligence officer and the methods used in the Russian secret services to discredit opponents. “Core individuals collect and amass detailed compromising material (kompromat in Russian) that can be used as leverage on every key figure inside and outside of government,” they write.
A few weeks ago, we spoke with Hill, on the record, for an article about Russia and the Trump Administration. She in no way gave the impression that she was an admirer of Trump or shared his views on Russia. While Trump himself has derided the intelligence agencies and their conclusion that Putin directed an operation aimed at undermining the 2016 election and Clinton’s candidacy, Hill expressed no such doubt. She added, “They couldn’t have anticipated, whoever is doing this”—Russian military intelligence, Russian foreign intelligence—“whoever, they couldn’t have imagined how lucky they would be and come across the motherlode of information.”
“Are they trying to turn him into the Manchurian Candidate?” Hill went on. “The Russians didn’t invent him, but now they seem to create that impression. It was all intended to discredit Clinton and the electoral and party system. They wanted to amplify someone like Trump because what he says is music to their ears.”
When asked why Trump seemed so admiring of Putin, particularly his “strength,” Hill said, “I don’t want to suggest that Trump is emulating Putin. Trump is his own creation. But Putin, coming from the K.G.B., a lot of his skill set comes out of the K.G.B. playbook. His public messaging is right out of Lenin, with slogans like ‘Land for the Peasants,’ and calling the Bolsheviks a majority when they were not. This is a skill set that Putin acquired. Trump knows how to play the media all on his own. He creates his own Twitter feed and uses it. He knows how to get the media’s attention without the benefit of a state-controlled media. He does it all on his own. Trump understands how a free media works.”
Many Russian and American analysts now refer to the current state of U.S.-Russia relations as a kind of new Cold War; Hill gave the current state of affairs an even more alarming tag. “I think we are in a hot war with Russia, not a cold war,” she said. “But we have to be careful about the analogy. It’s a more complex world. There is no set-piece confrontation. This is no holds barred. The Cold War was a more disciplined competition, aside from the near blowups in Berlin and Cuba, where we walked back from the brink. The Kremlin now is willing to jump over the abyss. They want to play for the asymmetry. They see themselves in a period of hot kinetic war. Also, this is not just two-way superpower. There is China, the rising powers. I almost see it as like the great power competition from the time before the Second World War.”
Hill also said that the Russians, partly because they “have” Edward Snowden, in Moscow, possess “a good idea of what the U.S. is capable of knowing. They got all of his information. You can be damn well sure that [Snowden’s] information is theirs.”
In the think-tank and analytical world of Russian specialists in Washington, Hill has a solid reputation. Celeste Wallander, who was Obama’s leading adviser on Russia, said, “Fiona is a respected analyst in the Washington Russia community, and she has been very tough and really hardheaded about who and what Putin is and about U.S.-Russian policy.”
And yet the general feeling in that same community is that Trump is not an ordinary Republican President—his comments about Putin are extraordinary, and so is the tumult in his Administration, particularly when it comes to its relations with Russia. Michael Flynn lost his job as the national-security adviser in less than a month because of his contacts with the Russian Ambassador, and others in the Trump circle—from Paul Manafort, Trump’s onetime campaign manager, to the Attorney General, Jeff Sessions, to Carter Page, a policy adviser during the race—are also being scrutinized. Some officials and analysts wonder if Hill is deluded in thinking, somehow, that she can play a positive and decisive role in a White House clouded by the prospect of congressional investigations and influenced so markedly by ideologues like Steve Bannon.
In late July, Hill wrote a column for Vox on why Putin might have wanted to interfere in the election. Her analysis was completely in line with consensus thinking. She concluded that Putin believed that the Obama Administration, and particularly Clinton, as Obama’s Secretary of State, had somehow been responsible for the anti-Kremlin demonstrations in 2011 and 2012 and that he wanted either to prevent Clinton from becoming President or, more likely, to do his best to weaken her. “A US president who is elected amid controversy and recrimination, reviled by a large segment of the electorate, and mired in domestic crises,” Hill wrote, “will be hard-pressed to forge a coherent foreign policy and challenge Russia.”
Beau Willimon On Donald Trump: “POTUS Must Be Removed From Twitter”
House Of Cards creator Beau Willimon shared a 16-point argument as to why Donald Trump should be removed from Twitter after his latest “tantrum.” Earlier this morning, Trump alleged that Barack Obama wiretapped Trump Tower during the presidential race. “Today’s tantrum is just the latest example of why @realDonaldTrump & @POTUS must be removed from @Twitter,” Willimon tweeted.
Adding that being the President of the United States comes with “a supreme and unique responsibility unlike any other user,” Willimon wrote that Trump’s tweets have a “real and significant impact on the business of governance, world affairs and national security.”
“President Trump has consistently made misleading claims, attacked the judiciary and threatened sovereign states, the press and public,” he continued. “His tweets recklessly bypass diplomatic channels without consultation from the State Department, IC or the Pentagon. Even as a private citizen it is arguable that he has violated Twitter rules regarding violent threats, harassment and hateful conduct. Certainly in the unique position of @POTUS the repercussions and intimations his tweets cross these lines.”
Willimon also expressed how today’s outburst “is broadcasting to foreign leaders his continuing impulsiveness, recklessness, delusion and ignorance about government.” Adding, “That makes Trump’s tweets a national security threat. It emboldens our enemies to take advantage of his flagrant shortcomings.”
He also pointed out that if people argue that removing his account is “violation of free speech” to consider how the White House “has retaliated against the press by selectively locking them out, called them ‘the enemy of the people’ and ignored hard questions.”
“But with his behavior on this service, Trump makes the argument for himself being a liability to the people,” Willimon continued. “The President is free to say whatever he wants, and has many of ways of doing so, but no private company owes him an outlet. While you cannot prevent the President from saying reckless things elsewhere, Twitter is not obligated to facilitate that here.”
Addressing Twitter, he concluded: “In fact, with your worldwide reach and impact on the media, you have a duty to steer clear of accounts facilitating national security threats. Twitter is amazing. It connects the world. That comes with its own responsibility: to do your part in protecting that world.”
This isn’t the first time Willimon has spoken out about POTUS. He previously tweeted a 25-point, anti-Trump “Declaration of Resistance,” calling for the President’s impeachment.
The writer-producer was referring to Trump alleging over the social media platform that Barack Obama had his “‘wires tapped’ in Trump Tower” before the election. “How low has President Obama gone to tapp my phones during the very sacred election process. This is Nixon/Watergate. Bad (or sick) guy,” the president tweeted from his personal account.
Since the president holds “a supreme and unique responsibility unlike any other user,” Willimon wrote that Trump’s tweets have “real and significant impact on the business of governance, world affairs and national security.” He continued, “President Trump has consistently made misleading claims, attacked the judiciary and threatened sovereign states, the press & public. His tweets recklessly bypass diplomatic channels without consultation from the State Department, [Intelligence Community] or the Pentagon.”
Willimon then deemed Trump’s tweets to be “a national security threat” for “broadcasting to foreign leaders his continuing impulsiveness, recklessness, delusion & ignorance about gov’t,” as well as emboldening “our enemies to take advantage of his flagrant shortcomings.”
Pointing to Trump’s war on mainstream media, which escalated to shutting out specific journalists from a White House press briefing, Willimon added, “Trump makes the argument for himself being a liability to the people” with his “behavior on this service.”
Tweeting directly to Twitter’s official feed, Willimon pleaded, “With your worldwide reach & impact on the media, you have a duty to steer clear of accounts facilitating nat’l security threats. @Twitter is amazing. It connects the world. That comes with its own responsibility: to do your part in protecting that world.”
According to a national survey released by Quinnipiac University in January, 64 percent of Americans said they want Trump’s Twitter account deleted. In the past, POTUS used the platform to bash and discredit media outlets, target politicians and the judge who blocked his travel ban, and slamming Arnold Schwarzenegger and Celebrity Apprentice, among other things.
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| WALTER MCBRIDE/WIREIMAGE; BILL O'LEARY/THE WASHINGTON POST VIA GETTY IMAGES |
WHAT TO MAKE OF DONALD TRUMP’S EARLY-MORNING WIRETAP TWEETS
Between six and six-thirty this morning, the President of the United States, who had returned to his Mar-a-Lago estate, in Florida, unleashed a series of tweets accusing his predecessor of tapping his phones just before Election Day: “a new low!” “This is Nixon/Watergate. Bad (or sick) guy!” Two hours later, he tweeted again, this time about Arnold Schwarzenegger’s decision to leave “The New Celebrity Apprentice”: “Sad end to great show.”
Donald Trump’s early-morning Twitter binge unleashed, as he likely expected it would, a flurry of comments on the same medium, with his partisans echoing his rage at Barack Obama while many others questioned Trump’s motives, his integrity, and his mental stability.
Others pointed to articles posted on Breitbart as a possible inspiration; it would not be the first time that Trump has been moved to action by something published on Breitbart, the former home of his close adviser Steve Bannon. One of the articles is based on Senator Orrin Hatch’s remark about the wiretaps that led to the downfall of Michael Flynn as the national-security adviser. Another is based on Mark Levin, a conservative radio host, who recently accused Obama of “police state” tactics to carry out a “silent coup” against Trump.
One of President Trump’s most consistent rhetorical maneuvers is a fairly basic but often highly effective one—the diversionary reverse accusation. When he is accused of benefitting from “fake news,” he flips the neologism on its head; suddenly CNN, the Times, and the rest are “fake news.” When Democratic politicians such as Chuck Schumer and Nancy Pelosi call for investigations of his campaign’s contacts with Russian officials, Trump posts pictures of those critics meeting publicly with Vladimir Putin and calls for an investigation. This happened on Saturday. He fogs the language and clouds the issue.
The stories on Breitbart appear to be related to the efforts of American intelligence and law-enforcement officials to investigate potential links between Trump aides and Russian officials. It would seem that Trump, in the same spirit of diversion, has conflated the work of the courts, law enforcement, and intelligence agencies with “Obama.”
As Benjamin Rhodes, the former deputy national-security adviser under Obama, put it in a tweet on Saturday, the President is not authorized to order a wiretap.
Ironically, the Obama Administration, after being informed that the Russian government was likely behind the hack of the Democratic National Committee and that the effort was intended to undermine Hillary Clinton, did not act more forcefully for fear of appearing to favor its own political party.
And there is other news as well. Trump, who for years has paid compliments to Putin’s strength and tactics, is expected to appoint as his main adviser on Russia Fiona Hill, a think-tank analyst who has described the Russian President as a gangster. Many members of the foreign-policy community in Washington are stunned. They wonder how Hill could take such a post when the Trump Administration is under scrutiny for its relations with Russian officials.
A dual citizen of the United States and the United Kingdom, Hill is a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, in Washington, and between 2006 and 2009 served as a Russia analyst on the National Intelligence Council, a kind of intelligence think-tank independent of the C.I.A. Hill is the co-author, with Clifford G. Gaddy, of a political and psychological portrait of the Russian President titled “Mr. Putin: Operative in the Kremlin.” The book describes Putin’s system as a “protection racket” in which he views himself as the “CEO of Russia, Inc.” and is served by “crony oligarchs.” “In reality,” Hill and Gaddy write, “his leadership style is more like that of a mafia family Don.”
Hill and Gaddy describe in detail Putin’s background as an intelligence officer and the methods used in the Russian secret services to discredit opponents. “Core individuals collect and amass detailed compromising material (kompromat in Russian) that can be used as leverage on every key figure inside and outside of government,” they write.
A few weeks ago, we spoke with Hill, on the record, for an article about Russia and the Trump Administration. She in no way gave the impression that she was an admirer of Trump or shared his views on Russia. While Trump himself has derided the intelligence agencies and their conclusion that Putin directed an operation aimed at undermining the 2016 election and Clinton’s candidacy, Hill expressed no such doubt. She added, “They couldn’t have anticipated, whoever is doing this”—Russian military intelligence, Russian foreign intelligence—“whoever, they couldn’t have imagined how lucky they would be and come across the motherlode of information.”
“Are they trying to turn him into the Manchurian Candidate?” Hill went on. “The Russians didn’t invent him, but now they seem to create that impression. It was all intended to discredit Clinton and the electoral and party system. They wanted to amplify someone like Trump because what he says is music to their ears.”
When asked why Trump seemed so admiring of Putin, particularly his “strength,” Hill said, “I don’t want to suggest that Trump is emulating Putin. Trump is his own creation. But Putin, coming from the K.G.B., a lot of his skill set comes out of the K.G.B. playbook. His public messaging is right out of Lenin, with slogans like ‘Land for the Peasants,’ and calling the Bolsheviks a majority when they were not. This is a skill set that Putin acquired. Trump knows how to play the media all on his own. He creates his own Twitter feed and uses it. He knows how to get the media’s attention without the benefit of a state-controlled media. He does it all on his own. Trump understands how a free media works.”
Many Russian and American analysts now refer to the current state of U.S.-Russia relations as a kind of new Cold War; Hill gave the current state of affairs an even more alarming tag. “I think we are in a hot war with Russia, not a cold war,” she said. “But we have to be careful about the analogy. It’s a more complex world. There is no set-piece confrontation. This is no holds barred. The Cold War was a more disciplined competition, aside from the near blowups in Berlin and Cuba, where we walked back from the brink. The Kremlin now is willing to jump over the abyss. They want to play for the asymmetry. They see themselves in a period of hot kinetic war. Also, this is not just two-way superpower. There is China, the rising powers. I almost see it as like the great power competition from the time before the Second World War.”
Hill also said that the Russians, partly because they “have” Edward Snowden, in Moscow, possess “a good idea of what the U.S. is capable of knowing. They got all of his information. You can be damn well sure that [Snowden’s] information is theirs.”
In the think-tank and analytical world of Russian specialists in Washington, Hill has a solid reputation. Celeste Wallander, who was Obama’s leading adviser on Russia, said, “Fiona is a respected analyst in the Washington Russia community, and she has been very tough and really hardheaded about who and what Putin is and about U.S.-Russian policy.”
And yet the general feeling in that same community is that Trump is not an ordinary Republican President—his comments about Putin are extraordinary, and so is the tumult in his Administration, particularly when it comes to its relations with Russia. Michael Flynn lost his job as the national-security adviser in less than a month because of his contacts with the Russian Ambassador, and others in the Trump circle—from Paul Manafort, Trump’s onetime campaign manager, to the Attorney General, Jeff Sessions, to Carter Page, a policy adviser during the race—are also being scrutinized. Some officials and analysts wonder if Hill is deluded in thinking, somehow, that she can play a positive and decisive role in a White House clouded by the prospect of congressional investigations and influenced so markedly by ideologues like Steve Bannon.
In late July, Hill wrote a column for Vox on why Putin might have wanted to interfere in the election. Her analysis was completely in line with consensus thinking. She concluded that Putin believed that the Obama Administration, and particularly Clinton, as Obama’s Secretary of State, had somehow been responsible for the anti-Kremlin demonstrations in 2011 and 2012 and that he wanted either to prevent Clinton from becoming President or, more likely, to do his best to weaken her. “A US president who is elected amid controversy and recrimination, reviled by a large segment of the electorate, and mired in domestic crises,” Hill wrote, “will be hard-pressed to forge a coherent foreign policy and challenge Russia.”
Beau Willimon On Donald Trump: “POTUS Must Be Removed From Twitter”
House Of Cards creator Beau Willimon shared a 16-point argument as to why Donald Trump should be removed from Twitter after his latest “tantrum.” Earlier this morning, Trump alleged that Barack Obama wiretapped Trump Tower during the presidential race. “Today’s tantrum is just the latest example of why @realDonaldTrump & @POTUS must be removed from @Twitter,” Willimon tweeted.
Adding that being the President of the United States comes with “a supreme and unique responsibility unlike any other user,” Willimon wrote that Trump’s tweets have a “real and significant impact on the business of governance, world affairs and national security.”
“President Trump has consistently made misleading claims, attacked the judiciary and threatened sovereign states, the press and public,” he continued. “His tweets recklessly bypass diplomatic channels without consultation from the State Department, IC or the Pentagon. Even as a private citizen it is arguable that he has violated Twitter rules regarding violent threats, harassment and hateful conduct. Certainly in the unique position of @POTUS the repercussions and intimations his tweets cross these lines.”
Willimon also expressed how today’s outburst “is broadcasting to foreign leaders his continuing impulsiveness, recklessness, delusion and ignorance about government.” Adding, “That makes Trump’s tweets a national security threat. It emboldens our enemies to take advantage of his flagrant shortcomings.”
He also pointed out that if people argue that removing his account is “violation of free speech” to consider how the White House “has retaliated against the press by selectively locking them out, called them ‘the enemy of the people’ and ignored hard questions.”
“But with his behavior on this service, Trump makes the argument for himself being a liability to the people,” Willimon continued. “The President is free to say whatever he wants, and has many of ways of doing so, but no private company owes him an outlet. While you cannot prevent the President from saying reckless things elsewhere, Twitter is not obligated to facilitate that here.”
Addressing Twitter, he concluded: “In fact, with your worldwide reach and impact on the media, you have a duty to steer clear of accounts facilitating national security threats. Twitter is amazing. It connects the world. That comes with its own responsibility: to do your part in protecting that world.”
This isn’t the first time Willimon has spoken out about POTUS. He previously tweeted a 25-point, anti-Trump “Declaration of Resistance,” calling for the President’s impeachment.
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