The article:
I've been thinking about this sequence of events all day—and it's a disturbing one, albeit in an amusing and harmless context:
The President saw a single line of an article on a television show
He tweeted that single line with apparently no idea who the author was or what the publication was, and indeed without reading the rest of the article.
Nobody in the White House vetted the tweet to discover the readily apparent fact that the article in question sharply criticized the President and supported the decision about which he was angrily complaining.
Nobody warned the President that the article was written by an author who had written numerous other articles ungraced by pleasant words about him—indeed, an author who has been calling him a threat to national security for nearly a year.
Nobody warned the President that the site he was about to praise has had a great deal of such writing by other writers as well.
It is a portrait in inconsequential and comical miniature of the incompetence and dysfunction we've been seeing since day one of the Trump Administration.
It's the incompetence I wrote about the day after the executive order itself emerged with virtually no vetting. It's also the ineptitude or irrelevance of the White House Counsel that Jack Goldsmith has pointed out:
People will have to be extremely careful with what they write
OTOH - people can talk about it, link to it, expand on it and produce memes. The more people tweet about statements / pictures etc with full info - the more 'nudging' goes on
The truth:
Trump sees something he thinks supports him.
Doesn't read the context
Tweets it
NY Times
Trump sees something that he thinks is wrong
Doesn't like it.
Doesn't realise that the paper had gone to press before the event happened
Tweets it
Put that in an advert, link to images of Americans at war, ask if you want your President to make decisions based on impulse and you are nudging people.
The USA has some pretty powerful / nasty political adverts - that are character based.