If we are serious about making America great again that we need to take away Donald Trump's iPhone and Twitter account
But let's not stop there. Let's insist on a social media ban for all senior administration officials, Republican and Democrat, from New Year's Eve 2020 onward.
I say this because it's become clear that we are being governed by Twitter posts.
Policy positions are being audience-tested online. Changes to how we are governed are made and withdrawn in less than 24 hours if they don't test well online.
Read more: Don’t underestimate President Trump
The Trump's El Paso Hospital visit has defined this administration and this era
The whole world is looking at its phone and their phones are looking (and often spying) right back at them. It's a revolution in how the government works and who it works for. Taking a pause – until, as the president says, we know whats going on – might be a wise move.
But a normal president would never have taken to Twitter to broadcast his message or take policy positions in the first place.
Twitter is where Kim Kardashian (remember her?) goes to get ahead of her latest controversy, it's a giant celebrity watering hole, it should not be the place where the leader of the most powerful person on the planet explains himself or what his administration is doing.
But of course we do not have a normal presidency, or indeed president, and Trump, like cyberspace itself, appears to have no morality, no principles, no core.
Read more: President Trump promotes his Irish golf course on Twitter, again
Instead, like every other celebrity apprentice, he simply has an audience and so he gives them what he thinks they want, hence these endless mini-Nuremberg's in search of ratings, the only real currency he understands.
Around the world, we're witnessing the lamentable rise of populist strongmen who prefer authoritarianism to democracy and spectacle over civility. Their modus operandi is the same the world over, to steamroll every real and imaginary standard we thought we possessed.
But the dangers of government by social media are all around us already. This week, for example, the Trump administration introduced new citizenship rules for some children of U.S. service members serving abroad, announcing that their offspring would no longer have automatic citizenship if born in another country starting on Oct. 29.
Instead, the administration announced, parents would have to apply for citizenship on behalf of the child.
MAGA hat wearing seniors at an anti-immigrant rally
Cue Twitter outrage. By the evening the howls of protest had become so loud that USCIS Acting Director Ken Cuccinelli also took to – what else – Twitter to calm the hysteria his own department had created.
By the way, Cuccinelli is 'USCIS Acting Director' and not 'Director' because no one on this sinking ship of an administration seems to keep their job long enough to be appointed and accept a full post.
Cuccinelli is now most famous for rewriting the Statue of Liberty poem whose words, “Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free” have long been associated with immigration to the US, highlighting the nation's long history as a haven for those fleeing oppression elsewhere.
But Cuccinelli's new version is, which turns our long history on its head, is: “Give me your tired and your poor who can stand on their own two feet and who will not become a public charge...”
It's not a cosmetic adjustment, its a monstrous and ahistoric rewrite. It's exactly the kind of nonsense that social media seems designed to promote. From YouTube to Facebook to Twitter we have seen the rise of alternative realities offering revisionist histories and conspiracy theories to the all too credulous.
Thanks to the endless churn of online drama current events now have a way of tumbling forward, often appallingly, leaving us gasping at one dumbshow as another takes its place.
But these years have been special. Special in the sense that each new horror that unfolds now seems to labor mightily to surpass the one that came before. How do I know this? Because the word 'unprecedented' has become a cliché.
We are being governed by celebrities and 'acting' directors. This is the world that social media has made, where politics has become a new and potentially lethal form of entertainment, not governance.
It won't end well. It's already a circus. The only thing to do is fire the clowns.
What are your thoughts? Let us know in the comments section, below.
Comments