trump tweet 0529
Twitter labels Trump tweet, says it violates platform's rules
03:12 - Source: CNN

Editor’s Note: Paul Callan is a CNN legal analyst, a former New York homicide prosecutor and of counsel to the New York law firm of Edelman & Edelman PC, focusing on wrongful conviction and civil rights cases. Follow him on Twitter @paulcallan. The opinions expressed in this commentary are his own. View more opinion on CNN.

CNN  — 

On Thursday President Donald Trump attempted to change the political subject from the news of 100,000 Covid-19 US deaths and the devastation of the American economy. His method of attention misdirection was a televised pronouncement from the Oval Office regarding the signing of an executive order to “defend free speech from one of the gravest dangers it has faced in American history.”

One would have thought the US was on the verge of an invasion by North Korean or Chinese hackers hellbent on shutting down the American press. This threat would have to be bigger than the threats faced by Americans in the Revolutionary and Civil wars not to mention our battle with the Nazis and the Japanese in World War II. All these wars constituted truly grave threats to America’s press freedom. But Mr. Trump described this one as the “gravest…in American History.” Even in the Trumpian world of “truthful hyperbole,” this claim deserves a place in the “Guinness Book of Records” for presidential deception. Mr. Trump was issuing an executive order which could restrain freedom of speech under the First Amendment because Twitter flagged two of his tweets for being “potentially misleading.”

The need to proffer an executive order, containing a presidential wish list of unconstitutional and unenforceable regulations, curtailing the free speech rights of social media platforms was apparently triggered when Twitter had the audacity to fact check two tweets posted by the President. The tweets touted his claims that the use of mail-in ballots would inevitably lead to voter fraud. Followers of Mr. Trump’s Twitter feed for the first time in over 42,000 tweets issued by Mr. Trump between May 2009 and May 29, 2020, were warned that this claim was “potentially misleading.” The Twitter chieftains then rubbed salt in the wound by hyperlinking to contrarian articles published by the Washington Post and at CNN, two of the President’s most despised media outlets.

A compilation of Trump insults complete with exotic graphs demonstrating the frequent use of insults on multiple targets can be found at the Post. The President’s insults directed at the press are so prolific that they have been the subject of many compilations. Ironically the author of undoubtedly the largest collection of presidential insults aimed at the integrity of America’s Fourth Estate now seeks the protection of an executive order because Twitter had the audacity to suggest that two of his more than 42,000 tweets contained unsubstantiated claims.

Strangely Twitter chose to chastise the President for his rather lame and oft repeated claim of the likelihood of “fraud” when any state proposes a way to make it easier to vote. Trump obviously fears that the larger the voter turnout, the more likely that the voters will throw him out of the White House. Twitter has passed up far more promising unsubstantiated, fraudulent, and patently false statements in the Twitter treasure trove of Trumpian lies.

The most despicable of all is probably the President’s recent and repeated debunked suggestions that MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough, the cohost of “Morning Joe,” had an affair with Lori Klausutis, an intern who once worked in Scarborough’s congressional office in Florida, and then was involved in a conspiracy to murder her. Klausutis’s death, according to an autopsy report, was the “result of an acute subdural hematoma which occurred as a result of a closed head trauma sustained in a simple fall,” which happened because of “a sudden cardiac arrhythmia from her undiagnosed floppy mitral valve disease.”

The reputations of both the deceased young woman and Scarborough have been smeared by this patently false claim. Scarborough was in Washington when the young woman died in Florida. These false and malicious claims, which appeared in six tweets by the President this month, should have been flagged at the time Trump made the Twitter posts instead of the belated apology issued by Twitter on Tuesday. Klausutis’ widower, T.J. Klausutis, wrote to Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey and asked him to remove Trump’s tweets. Twitter told CNN that it would not be removing the tweets.

Ignoring the obviously false and clearly defamatory murder claim, Twitter initially chose to chastise the President about his bogus election mail fraud theory.

The entire sordid history of Trump’s repeated posting of lies and often defamatory statements on Twitter and in other media outlets suggests that Trump needs no new laws protecting him from social media. The President’s misuse of Twitter may have reached its apex on Friday morning when he tweeted “When the looting starts, the shooting starts” in response to the Minneapolis protests happening over the death of George Floyd. Twitter hid the tweet from view and placed a warning on it for “glorifying violence.”

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    Social media needs protection from Trump. He is misusing the presidency to quash free speech. His proposed executive order is nothing but political whining. If its substantive proposals were ever enacted into law they would clearly violate the First Amendment of the Constitution which holds political speech by the press and the people to be sacred. US courts would undoubtedly find that Twitter’s statements about Trump’s flagged posts are examples of political free speech, fully protected by the First Amendment. This is how the courts would resolve Mr. Trump’s “gravest dangers” to free speech in American history.