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jordanianroyals · 3 years

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Opinion: Understanding the dynamics that led to Jordan’s royal crisis

By Hassan A Barari (Professor of International Relations at Qatar University), 13 April 2021

Jordan, currently led by King Abdullah II, has long been perceived as an oasis of peace and stability in a volatile region, and for good reason. Indeed, unlike those of its neighbours, Jordan’s governing institutions proved to be robust and reliable in the face of myriad domestic and external challenges over the years. The Jordanian regime survived even the Arab Spring, thanks to the Jordanian people’s trust in and loyalty to the monarchy.

And yet, events of this month demonstrated that Jordan, too, is not immune to domestic instability.

On April 3, King Abdullah’s popular half-brother, Prince Hamzah, was put under de facto house arrest for his alleged role in a conspiracy to undermine Jordan’s national security. It was known that he had been attending tribal meetings critical of the king, but the news of his arrest still shocked the Jordanian people and the world.

Rather than seeing the intervention as a warning and quietly backing down, the prince decided to fight back. In a videotaped statement, he denied participating in any conspiracy against his half-brother but accused the kingdom’s “ruling system” of corruption, incompetence and harassment.

In response, the government issued its own statement and accused Prince Hamzah of collaborating with former Chief of the Royal Court, Bassem Awadallah, and unnamed “foreign entities”, to destabilise the country. The authorities also revealed that Awadallah, who served as planning minister and finance minister in the past, has been arrested alongside several others from the higher echelons of Jordan’s governing elite.

Prince Hamzah swiftly responded to the accusation of foreign collaboration by releasing an audio recording of his conversations with Jordan’s military chief, which indicated that the prince was targeted not for his involvement with any foreign power, but for meeting with the king’s domestic critics. This gave the prince further credibility and increased the public’s support for him.

Eventually, after mediation from members of the royal family, Prince Hamzah signed a letter promising to abide by the traditions and approaches of the ruling monarchy, de-escalating the crisis.

But what was behind this unprecedented upheaval in the royal family that carried Jordan to international headlines and gave rise to fears that this oasis of stability may soon descent into chaos?

This crisis was the result of deep-rooted rifts and rivalries within the royal family, as well as the growing public resentment over the government’s failure to implement successful political and economic reforms.

Since the establishment of the Emirate of Transjordan in 1921, Jordan has been ruled by the Hashemite royal family. For nearly 100 years, the Hashemites have managed to keep their house in order and avoided divisions and feuds that resulted in the fall of many monarchies. But a rivalry that started some 20 years ago eventually resulted in last week’s feud and shattered the royal family’s image as a strong, united and stable governing body.

When Jordan’s King Al Hussein bin Talal passed away from cancer in 1999, Abdullah was crowned and his younger half-brother, Hamzah, was titled the crown prince of Jordan. The designation was out of respect for King Hussein, who ruled for 47 years and was known to have favoured Hamzah the most among his 12 children from four marriages.

In 2004, however, King Abdullah II relieved Prince Hamzah of his title and in 2009 appointed his then-teenage son, Prince Al Hussein, as the new crown prince of Jordan. The move consolidated King Abdullah II’s power, but also caused resentment among Prince Hamzah’s supporters within the ruling elite.

The relationship between King Abdullah II and Prince Hamzah all but broke down after the appointment of a new crown prince, but the two royals successfully kept the tension between them hidden from the public for a very long time.

However, things started to change over the last few years. As Prince Hamzah’s popularity increased, the king started to view him as a threat to his authority. He stripped his half-brother of his military titles, indicating his intention to keep him away from Jordan’s leading institutions for good. In response, Prince Hamzah started talking publicly about government mismanagement and corruption, and established himself as a well-respected anti-corruption figure in the eyes of the public. Over the last three years, he also held many consultative meetings with Jordan’s tribal leaders. During these meetings, it is alleged, the government was repeatedly criticised for failing to end corruption and to restore public trust.

As Prince Hamzah successfully cast himself as a down-to-earth royal who understands the worries and struggles of common Jordanians, Crown Prince Al Hussein failed to make any impression on the public. All this increased King Abdullah II’s worries about the future of his rule and paved the way for the public rift on April 3.

The king would have been less concerned about Prince Hamzah had he been more proactive in his attempts to tackle the political and economic challenges the country is facing.

Since his accession to the throne in 1999, King Abdullah II and the ruling elites surrounding him put reform efforts on the back burner.

While the king presented himself to the West as a committed reformer, he failed to support this rhetoric with a credible blueprint for transitioning Jordan from autocracy to democracy. The modest reform package he passed on the heels of a series of demonstrations during the Arab Spring proved enough to calm tensions temporarily, and appease the West, but did not satisfy the significant number of Jordanians who are yearning to live in a democracy.

The king always thought the Jordanian people would continue to support him, even in the absence of meaningful structural reforms, if he ensures the economy is functioning in a satisfactory manner. But Jordan is now struggling economically. Youth unemployment is on the rise, and many Jordanians are fearful for the future.

More importantly, in light of these economic challenges, Jordanians seem to be losing faith in the king’s ability to keep Jordan politically stable, economically prosperous and safe from external threats in the years to come. Indeed, opinion polls in recent years repeatedly demonstrated that a clear majority of Jordanians believe the country is heading in the wrong direction under King Abdullah II. It is therefore understandable that the king grew concerned about the rise of a younger royal who successfully presented himself to the public as an honest anti-corruption figure who understands the struggles of the common people.

Thus far, the Jordanian government did not provide any proof to back its claim that Prince Hamzah conspired with a foreign entity to destabilise the country. While the identity of this foreign entity is not publicly known, it is strongly implied, by figures close to the government, that Israel is the culprit. Indeed, the Israeli government has plenty of reason to try and manipulate the Jordanian government to support its interests. Jordan has long been a key defender of Palestinian rights and has been reluctant to embrace the newly emerged alliance between Israel and a group of Arab states led by Saudi Arabia.

But as the Jordanian government refrained from officially accusing any foreign power of conspiring with Prince Hamzah, a growing number of Jordanians suspect that the government is not telling the whole truth. Some even go as far as accusing the government of baselessly implying that the prince has links to foreign entities to make him less appealing to disgruntled but patriotic Jordanians. There is a growing suspicion in the country that the entire crisis was staged to eliminate Prince Hamzah as an alternative to King Abdullah II within the royal family.

On April 7, the king publicly addressed the royal rift for the first time in a letter read on television, saying the “sedition” that caused him “pain and anger” has now been buried. But he refrained from giving any further details or explaining what foreign entities have been involved in the alleged plot against his rule. His statement, aimed at reassuring the public that all is well within the monarchy, failed to calm the growing anxieties. What the Jordanian public wants to hear is that their king is committed to changing his approach to governance that left so many of them impoverished. King Abdullah II, however, appears more interested in eliminating his perceived rivals than addressing the real issues that are threatening the future of his rule.

This month’s events were a symptom, not the cause, of Jordan’s crisis. The country’s problems are rooted not in any real or imagined conspiracy, but in the reluctance of its rulers to implement much-needed reforms. If the king does not act fast to address the grievances that led to the increase of Prince Hamzah’s popularity in the first place, Jordan may one day lose its status as an oasis of safety and stability without the help of any domestic or foreign adversary.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera’s editorial stance.

Hassan A Barari is currently a professor of International Relations at Qatar University. He previously taught at different universities including Yale University, the University of Jordan and Nebraska University of Omaha. He also served as a senior fellow at the US Institute of Peace. He is the author of ten books and a well known commentator on Middle Eastern politics.

#King Abdullah II #prince hamzah #article

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koreaunderground · 3 years

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(2020/05/19) Why is This Website Port Scanning me

[nullsweep.com][1]

[1]: <https://nullsweep.com/why-is-this-website-port-scanning-me/>

# Why is This Website Port Scanning me

Charlie Belmer

6-7 minutes

* * *

Recently, I was tipped off about certain sites performing localhost port scans against visitors, presumably as part of a user fingerprinting and tracking or bot detection. This didn't sit well with me, so I went about investigating the practice, and it seems many sites are port scanning visitors for dubious reasons.

## A Brief Port Scanning Primer

Port Scanning is an adversarial technique frequently used by penetration testers and hackers to scan internet facing machines and determine what applications or services are listening on the network, usually so that specific attacks can be carried out. It's common for security software to detect active port scans and flag it as potential abuse.

Most home routers don't have any open ports, so scanning an internet users IP address is unlikely to return any meaningful data. However, many users run software on their computer that listens on ports for various reasons \- online gaming, media sharing, and remote connections are just a few things that consumers might install on a home PC.

A Port scan can give a website information about what software you are running. Many ports have a well defined set of services that use them, so a list of open ports gives a pretty good view of running applications. For instance, Steam (a gaming store and platform) is known to run on port 27036, so a scanner seeing that port open could have reasonable confidence that the user also had steam open while visiting the web site.

## Watching Ebay Port Scan My Computer

In the past I have worked on security products that specifically worried about port scanning from employee web browsers. Attack frameworks like [BeEF][2] include port scanning features, which can be used to compromise user machines or other network devices. So, I wanted to be able to alert on any port scanning on machines as a potential compromise, and a site scanning localhost might trip those alerts.

[2]: <https://beefproject.com/>

On the other hand, it's [been reported][3] on a few times in the past as banks sometimes port scan visitors, and I have heard Threat Matrix offers this as a customer malware detection check.

[3]: <https://www.theregister.co.uk/2018/08/07/halifax_bank_ports_scans/>

I was given the example of ebay as a site that includes port scanning, but when I initially navigated there I didn't see any suspicious behavior. I thought they might use some heuristics to determine who to scan, so tried a few different browsers and spoofed settings, without any luck.

I thought it might be because I run Linux, so I created a new Windows VM and sure enough, I saw the port scan occurring in the browser tools from the ebay home page:

![][4]Ebay port scan

[4]: https://nullsweep.com/content/images/2020/05/ebay_port_scan.png

Looking at the list of ports they are scanning, they are looking for VNC services being run on the host, which is the same thing that was reported for bank sites. I marked out the ports and what they are known for (with a few blanks for ones I am unfamiliar with):

* 5900: VNC * 5901: VNC port 2 * 5902: VNC port 3 * 5903: VNC port 4 * 5279: * 3389: Windows remote desktop / RDP * 5931: Ammy Admin remote desktop * 5939: * 5944: * 5950: WinVNC * 6039: X window system * 6040: X window system * 63333: TrippLite power alert UPS * 7070: RealAudio

VNC is sometimes run as part of bot nets or viruses as a way to remotely log into a users computer. There are several malware services that leverage VNC for these purposes. However it is also a valid tool used by administrators for remote access to machines, or by some end user support software, so the presence of VNC is a poor indicator of malware.

Furthermore, when I installed and ran a VNC server, I didn't detect any difference in site behavior - so why is it looking for it?

## How Port Scanning with WebSockets Works

WebSockets are intended to allow a site to create bi-directional communication like traditional network sockets. This allows sites to periodically send information to a client browser without user interaction or front end polling, which is a win for usability.

When a web socket is configured, it specifies a destination host and port, which do not have to be the same domain that the script is served from. To do a port scan, the script only has to specify a private IP address (like localhost) and the port it wishes to scan.

WebSockets only speak HTTP though, so unless the host and port being scanned are a web socket server, the connection won't succeed. In order to get around this, we can use connection timing to determine whether the port is open or not. Ports that are open take longer in the browser, because there is a TLS negotiation step.

You also might get different error messages. If you have python installed, try running the following to create a local web server running on port 8080: [code] python3 -m http.server 8080

[/code]

Now, open your browser developer console (usually options -> Web Developer -> Console) and type some JavaScript in directly. Here is what I see when I do it in chrome: [code] > var s = new WebSocket("ws://127.0.0.1:8080") < undefined VM1131:1 WebSocket connection to 'ws://127.0.0.1:8080/' failed: Error during WebSocket handshake: Unexpected response code: 200 (anonymous) @ VM1131:1 >var s = new WebSocket("ws://127.0.0.1:8081") <undefined VM1168:1 WebSocket connection to 'ws://127.0.0.1:8081/' failed: Error in connection establishment: net::ERR_CONNECTION_REFUSED

[/code]

Between error message introspection and timing attacks, a site can have a pretty good idea of whether a given port is open.

## Port Scanning is Malicious

Whether the port scan is used as part of an infection or part of e-commerce or bank "security checks", it is clearly malicious behavior and may fall on the wrong side of the law.

If you observe this behavior, I encourage you to complain to the institution performing the scans, and install extensions that attempt to block this kind of phenomenon in your browser, generally by preventing these types of scripts from loading in the first place.

#websites #localhost #security #privacy

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dreaminginthedeepsouth · 4 years

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LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

October 22, 2020

Heather Cox Richardson

Today had two important takeaways:

Intelligence officials warned today that Russia recently hacked into our local and state computer networks. This could compromise our voting infrastructure. Intelligence officials believe our adversaries will try to help Trump, possibly by casting doubt on the voting results. While the administration has tried to insist that Iran and China are as significant a threat, experts disagree. Yesterday, Director of National Intelligence John Ratcliffe identified Iran as the originator of fake emails purporting to be the from the alt-right gang the Proud Boys warning Democrats to vote for Trump, but the information they used for the enterprise was all public. Russia, though, has hacked our private election systems, making officials worry that it could change or delete voter data, throwing people off the rolls or invalidating mail-in ballots.

Bottom line on tonight’s final presidential debate: Trump needed to move the needle in his direction. He didn’t. Biden needed not to lose voters. He didn’t. The debate will likely not change the trajectory of the election.

If you need a break after this week’s news hurricane, you can quit reading right here.

For those sticking around….

This was not a good day for the president’s reelection campaign. He seemed unable to get over how angry he was at Lesley Stahl from CBS’s 60 Minutes after yesterday’s interview for a special program Sunday evening, and ultimately decided to post on Facebook the video the White House took during it. Trump’s team had said they were recording “for archival purposes only,” and posting the video meant Trump violated his agreement with the network.

Trump seemed to think showing the clip would illustrate how poorly the media treats him, but in fact it shows Stahl behaving professionally, asking solid questions and fact-checking the president, while Trump argues and denigrates her. If the clip was supposed to generate sympathy for him, it backfired.

The debate did him no favors either. Debate moderator Kristen Welker of NBC News was far more effective at keeping control over the debate than the previous two moderators were, especially at first, when the two men appeared to be afraid of her cutting their mics. Trump could not contain himself for long, though, and slipped pretty quickly back into talking over Welker and Biden both. Still, he was far more restrained than he was at the first debate.

More significantly, he made little effort to use his time to connect with voters. He focused simply on badgering Biden and rehearsing the talking points that have become almost set pieces in his performances. They are not entirely comprehensible to someone who is not reading or watching right-wing media, but they are quite shockingly full of lies. And while his language is familiar to his usual audience, it is unlikely to attract new voters, who will likely be confused at best and, possibly, bored after hearing the same phrases for so long.

While Biden, too, strayed from the truth on occasion, CNN fact checker Daniel Dale put it this way: “For a fact checker, you’re kind of sitting there w/Biden. Occasionally you’re like oh that’s wrong. With Trump you’re like the ‘I Love Lucy’ episode in the chocolate factory. You don’t know which one to pick up because there’s just so much.” He noted, “From a lying perspective, Trump is even worse tonight than in the first debate.”

Trump did not make much of a case for his reelection tonight. He seemed to have no plans for what he would like to accomplish in a second term, although he did say he hoped to create a new healthcare plan (he has said repeatedly he already has one). He mocked Biden for talking about the so-called “kitchen table issues” that are important to ordinary voters, and insisted that Biden should have done everything he talks about accomplishing in the future back when he was vice president under President Barack Obama. At one point, Trump talked about what he would do “when I become president.”

For his part, Biden largely ignored Trump’s wild answers and tried to outline his policies, which he described with more detail than clarity, but which were interesting nonetheless because they offered something new when compared with Trump’s rote performance, worn thin by familiarity. Biden had no major slips. Trump pounced on Biden’s declaration that the nation must transition away from oil, instantly responding, “Will you remember that Texas, Pennsylvania, Oklahoma, Ohio?” But Pennsylvania and Ohio produce just a tiny bit of crude oil—they are both primarily natural gas states—and Trump's identification of Texas and Oklahoma was a self-own. He is worried about carrying Texas and Oklahoma?

Most telling was that Trump was unprepared for Welker’s final, excellent but softball question: if they were to be elected, what would they say on Inauguration Day to voters who did not support them. Trump claimed that rebuilding the economy “to make our country totally successful as it was prior to the plague coming over from China” would bring Americans together, and then pivoted to attacking Biden, warning that if he were elected, “you will have a depression the likes of which you’ve never seen.”

Biden, though, recognized that Welker had deliberately lobbed them the opportunity to make a final pitch to voters. He promised to represent all voters, not just those who voted for him, and promised to put “science over fiction” and “hope over fear.” “We’re going to choose to move forward because we have enormous opportunities, enormous opportunities to make things better,” he said. “We can grow this economy, we can deal with the systemic racism, and at the same time we can make sure that our economy is being run and moved and motivated by clean energy creating millions of new jobs. That’s the fact.”

On the ballot this year, he said, are “Decency, honor, respect, treating people with dignity, making sure that everyone has an even chance, and I'm going to make sure you get that.”

Instant polls gave the debate to Biden by the same margins showing in the polls in general. CNN had Biden at 53% and Trump at 39%; Data Progress had Biden at 52% and Trump at 41%; US Politics had Biden at 52% and Trump at 39%.

—-

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

Heather Cox Richardson

#Letters From An American #Heather Cox Richardson #political #election 2020 #corrupt GOP

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valentineish · 3 years

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Russian Interference in 2020 Included Influencing Trump Associates, Report Says

By Julian E. Barnes

WASHINGTON — President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia authorized extensive efforts to interfere in the American presidential election to denigrate the candidacy of Joseph R. Biden Jr., including intelligence operations to influence people close to former President Donald J. Trump, according to a declassified intelligence report released Tuesday.

The report did not name those people but seemed to be a reference to the work of Mr. Trump’s former personal lawyer Rudolph W. Giuliani, who relentlessly pushed allegations of corruption about Mr. Biden and his family involving Ukraine.

“Russian state and proxy actors who all serve the Kremlin’s interests worked to affect U.S. public perceptions in a consistent manner,” the report said.

...

The reports, compiled by career officials, amounted to a repudiation of Mr. Trump, his allies and some of his top administration officials. They categorically dismissed allegations of foreign-fed voter fraud, cast doubt on Republican accusations of Chinese intervention on behalf of Democrats and undermined the allegations that Mr. Trump and his allies spread about the Biden family’s work in Ukraine.

The report also found that there were no efforts by Russia or other countries to change ballots themselves, unlike in 2016. Efforts by Russian hackers to probe state and local networks were unrelated to efforts by Moscow to influence the presidential vote.

The report also found more resilience among the American public and awareness of foreign efforts to spread disinformation. Intelligence agencies also credited social media companies with acting faster to remove fake accounts and spreaders of disinformation.

...

“Foreign malign influence is an enduring challenge facing our country,” Avril B. Haines, the director of national intelligence, said in a statement. “These efforts by U.S. adversaries seek to exacerbate divisions and undermine confidence in our democratic institutions.”

Some of the intelligence report’s details were released in the months leading up to the election, reflecting an effort by the intelligence community to disclose more information about foreign operations during the campaign after its reluctance to do so in 2016 helped misinformation spread.

During the 2020 campaign, intelligence officials outlined how Russia was spreading damaging information about Mr. Biden’s son, Hunter, in an attempt to boost Mr. Trump’s re-election chances. It also outlined efforts by Iran in the final days before the election to aid Mr. Biden by spreading letters falsely purporting to be from the far-right group the Proud Boys.

Allegations of election interference have been some of the most politically divisive in recent years. The intelligence report is akin to an early 2017 declassified assessment that laid out the conclusions about Russia’s interference in Donald J. Trump’s electoral victory, further entrenched the partisan debate over Mr. Trump’s relationship with Moscow and cemented his enmity toward intelligence and law enforcement officials.

— NYT; March 16th, 2021, 4:03pm EST (link in reblog)

Yeah so, foreign interference did go down for the 2020 U.S. Presidential Election. None of the efforts went towards direct manipulation of the polls. They instead focused on a disinformation and political friction campaigns with the public. People were less susceptible to this influence, but not immune.

Couldn't have possibly seen that coming. /s

#2020 election #us politics #politics #intlpol #new york times #biden #trump #russia #iran #disinformation #open mic night

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unlikely-adversaries-bracket · 9 months

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R1M40

"joongdok fought so hard in that yaoi bracket against even the most iconic slash ships. and for what? to be obliterated by a mushroom?? well i guess we're not immune to little a mushroom i'll admit that"

@tournament-winners-tournament - link to poll

@autisticboybattleroyale - link to poll

#unlikely adversaries polls #unlikely adversaries poll #dewdrop bonnet #mushrooms #kim dokja #yoo joonghyuk #joongdok #omniscient reader's viewpoint #omnicient reader #l #l death note #death note #tails #tails miles #tails sonic

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newstfionline · 4 years

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Headlines

Canada extends COVID-19 international border closures, mandatory quarantine order (Reuters) Canada is extending a global travel ban and mandatory quarantine measures that require most travelers to Canada, including citizens returning home, to self-isolate for 14 days upon arrival, the Canadian government said on Tuesday. The mandatory quarantine order is now in effect until at least Aug. 31, while the travel ban for most other foreign travelers is extended to at least July 31, according to federal documents. Travel by U.S. citizens are covered under a separate agreement, which was extended earlier this month to keep the U.S.-Canada border closed to all non-essential travel until at least July 21. U.S. citizens who are not deemed essential are still subject to the quarantine.

Workers are getting laid off for a second time, as the virus’s surge puts reopenings on hold (Washington Post) Millions of American workers are suffering from economic whiplash, thinking they were finally returning to work only to be sent home again because of the coronavirus’s latest surge. Stores, restaurants, gyms and other businesses that reopened weeks ago are shuttering once more, and this time Congress appears less inclined to provide additional aid. Other businesses that had banked on customers returning and restrictions lifting—such as hotel chains, construction firms and movie theaters—are seeing hours cut and reopening dates pushed back indefinitely as consumer demand stalls. Thousands of workers are caught in these rapidly shifting seas, many of them hourly and low-wage service employees, and are now facing unemployment for a second time. They say the past few months have been jarring: navigating unemployment in March, preparing to go back to work in April or May, and now confronting the prospect of what could be another long stretch without a paycheck. This time, many say they’re on even shakier financial ground as they topple into yet another period without a job. They face what experts have begun calling a “fiscal cliff”: the July end date for the $600 in weekly supplemental aid that has helped keep so many families afloat.

Fighting Over Masks in Public Is the New American Pastime (NYT) On any given day, somewhere in the United States, someone is going to wake up, leave the house and get in a huge argument with a stranger about wearing masks. Grocery store managers are training staff on how to handle screaming customers. Fistfights are breaking out at convenience stores. Some restaurants even say they’d rather close than face the wrath of various Americans who believe that masks, which help prevent the spread of coronavirus, impinge on their freedom.

Americans are living in a big ‘anger incubator.’ (Washington Post) Americans are angry. The country erupted into the worst civil unrest in decades after the death of George Floyd, and anger about police violence and the country’s legacy of racism is still running high. At the same time, we’re dealing with anger provoked by the coronavirus pandemic: anger at public officials because they’ve shut down parts of society, or anger because they aren’t doing enough to curb the virus. Anger about being required to wear a mask, or anger toward people who refuse to wear a mask. Anger with anyone who doesn’t see things the “right” way. “We’re living, in effect, in a big anger incubator,” said Raymond Novaco, a psychology professor at the University of California at Irvine, who has expertise in anger assessment and treatment. Surveys over the past few years suggested that anger had risen in the country even before the 2020 crises. A Gallup poll conducted in 2018, for example, concluded that Americans’ stress, worry and anger had intensified that year. Twenty-two percent of Americans had felt anger the previous day, up from 17 percent the previous year.

Working from car (CNN) In the United States, “working from home” is now becoming “working from car.” CNN reports that even CEOs and senior management have set up shop in their vehicles, searching for a change of scenery and some privacy. It may seem like an unlikely office, but cars are designed to accommodate sitting down for long periods of time, and the mobility means that the view beyond your computer can change every day. Bluetooth makes cars a great place to take a call, and consoles can double as a desk.

Seattle cops clear 'occupied' zone, more than 20 arrested (AP) Seattle police turned out in force early Wednesday at the city’s “occupied” protest zone, tore down demonstrators’ encampments and used bicycles to herd the protesters after the mayor ordered the area cleared following two fatal shootings in less than two weeks. Wearing helmets and wielding batons and rifles, officers converged on the area at dawn. Officers stood shoulder-to-shoulder on several streets while others created a makeshift fence with their bicycles, using it to push protesters back away from the center of the zone. As residents of the neighborhood near the city’s downtown watched from balconies, police cleared out the protesters’ tents from a park within the zone and made sure no one was left in the park’s bathrooms. Police Chief Carmen Best said there were at least 23 arrests. “Our job is to support peaceful demonstration but what has happened on these streets over the last two weeks is lawless and it’s brutal and bottom line it is simply unacceptable,” Best told reporters.

Pompeo faces frosty U.N. reception (Foreign Policy) U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo received a scolding from other members of the United Nations Security Council on Tuesday as he pushed for an extension of an arms embargo against Iran. The combative tone from allies and adversaries of the United States “underscored how little deference other countries pay the Trump administration as it faces a grim reelection contest,” FP’s Colum Lynch and Robbie Gramer report. France’s UN ambassador, Nicolas de Rivière, was firm in restating his country’s position on keeping the Iran nuclear deal intact as much as possible in the face of U.S. attempts to dismantle it. “There is as yet no serious alternative to prevent Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons, and its disappearance would improve neither the regional situation nor the security of our population,” he said.

Russian voters agree to extend Putin’s rule to 2036 (AP) A majority of voters approved changes to Russia’s constitution that would allow President Vladimir Putin to hold power until 2036, but the weeklong plebiscite that ended Wednesday was tarnished by widespread reports of pressure on voters and other irregularities. With most of the nation’s polls closed and 20% of precincts counted, 72% voted for the constitutional amendments, according to election officials.

With Hong Kong security law, China writes broad international powers for itself (Washington Post/Foreign Policy) After China published a Hong Kong national security law as a fait accompli Tuesday night without the usual feedback process, the broader implications of the most consequential political change in the financial center since its 1997 handover are coming into focus. Overnight, Hong Kong’s 7.5 million residents have been put under the same speech restrictions as the mainland, with possible life imprisonment for those deemed guilty of “subversion”—a standard charge used to jail political dissidents and human rights activists in China. Equally striking in China’s move was the realpolitik logic underlying the new law: It signaled that China sees no need to abide by international agreements it made from a position of weakness in earlier years as a poorer nation. The law asserted extraterritorial jurisdiction over critics of Beijing anywhere in the world. In theory, then, a U.S. citizen who tweeted support for Hong Kong independence or criticized the internment camps in Xinjiang could be arrested while passing through Hong Kong, extradited to the mainland, and sentenced to a Chinese prison term. In practice, the law is likely to be deployed mostly against Hong Kongers. But going by the record in the mainland, former Chinese citizens, dual nationals, and even non-citizens of Chinese descent may find themselves targeted. In a disturbing move, China is also preventing Canada from consular access to a Chinese Canadian prisoner, sentenced to eight years for practicing Falun Gong, by claiming that she had renounced Canadian citizenship.

Beijing warns Taiwan not to ‘mess up’ HK affairs (South China Morning Post) Beijing has warned the ruling party in Taiwan not to “mess up” Hong Kong affairs, as Taipei prepares to help Hongkongers seeking to flee their city, where a contentious national security law has been imposed. Zhu Fenglian, a spokeswoman for Beijing’s Taiwan Affairs Office, described the independence-leaning Democratic Progressive Party as a “black hand” that wanted to undermine the prosperity and stability of Hong Kong. “What the DPP authorities said was an undisguised distortion of facts, which served only to reveal its vicious intention to mess up Hong Kong and seek independence for Taiwan,” she said. Zhu was responding to Taiwanese President Tsai Ing-wen and her party’s comments that the new legislation violated democracy and human rights in Hong Kong, and that Taipei would offer humanitarian assistance for fleeing Hongkongers.

Australia to boost military spending (Foreign Policy) Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison has pledged to spend roughly $185 billion on defense over the next ten years as he unveiled the country’s new defense strategy. Morrison said the increased importance of the Indo-Pacific and “the strategic competition between China and the United States” meant that Australia needed to increase its defensive capabilities. Those upgrades include purchasing an anti-ship missile system from the United States worth $550 million as well as an underwater surveillance system costing at least $3.45 billion.

Lebanon’s plea to skeptical expats: Come visit, bring cash (AP) With Beirut’s airport partially reopening from a three-month virus shutdown, the government is hoping thousands of Lebanese expatriates will return for the summer—and bring dollars desperately needed to prop up the crashing economy. But Lebanon’s far-flung diaspora, renowned as entrepreneurs who for years sent their cash home, may no longer be willing to do that. Many are staying away, appalled at the ruling elite’s handling of Lebanon’s unprecedented economic and financial meltdown and outraged at local banks holding their dollar deposits hostage. Some have stopped sending money, except small amounts to sustain their families. Others are considering cutting ties completely with a corrupt country they say has robbed them of a future. Once a beacon of free market growth and fine living, Lebanon is suffering the worst economic crisis in its modern history. The local currency has lost around 80% of its value against the dollar on the black market since October and continues to tumble daily. Banks have clamped down on withdrawals and transfers of U.S. dollars. Food prices have soared, businesses and households have been thrown into disarray, salaries and savings are fast disappearing and unemployment has surged. The crisis stems from decades of systematic corruption and mismanagement. Public frustration exploded into street protests in October demanding the entire leadership go. Now, a slide into violence is feared amid mounting poverty and sectarian tensions.

COVID-19 cases mount at the ends of the Earth in Timbuktu (AP) Harandane Toure started taking malaria pills when he first spiked a fever but as the days passed his illness only worsened. Doctors ultimately told him he was among the hundreds now infected with the coronavirus in this town long fabled for being inaccessible from the rest of the world. There are no commercial flights to Timbuktu, whose remote location in the Sahara Desert has long made the town’s name synonymous with the ends of the Earth. Health officials say the global pandemic has managed to reach here all the same. Already there are more than 500 cases including at least nine deaths, making it Mali’s largest outbreak outside the capital.

#headlines #news

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How Trump Reshaped the Presidency in Over 11,000 Tweets https://nyti.ms/32aaAbV

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This is an incredibly well-researched investigative article looking at Trump's Twitter account. They research the Russian bots, white-supremacist followers and conspiracy groups like Anon. To truly appreciate the full article you need to go to the website to see the graphics and tweets. THREAD by @NYTimes and articles below 👇👇🤔

"We examined President Trump's use of Twitter since taking office, reviewing all his tweets, retweets and followers, and interviewing nearly 50 current and former administration officials, lawmakers and Twitter executives and employees."

"Early on, aides wanted to restrain President Trump's Twitter habit, even considering asking the company to impose a 15-minute delay on his tweets. That didn't happen. A barrage of personal attacks, bombast and outrage over more than 11,000 tweets did."

"President Trump's tweets have helped spread a culture of suspicion and distrust of facts into the political mainstream."

"See how conspiracy-mongers, racists and spies have influenced what he absorbs and amplifies on Twitter."

“The aides seek to cultivate the image of a man who understands ‘regular people.’ Mr. Trump’s team believes that his unvarnished writing, poor punctuation and increasing profanity on Twitter signals authenticity — a contrast to” his rivals’ feeds."

"What happens when ordinary people end up in President Trump's tweets? On May 1, a fire lieutenant in Tuscaloosa found out for himself."

"We hope you have time for all of the articles in this investigation on Donald Trump’s Twitter presidency. But if you don't have time right now, here are some key takeaways."

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How Trump Reshaped the Presidency in Over 11,000 Tweets

By MICHAEL D. SHEAR, MAGGIE HABERMAN, NICHOLAS CONFESSORE, KAREN YOURISH, LARRY BUCHANAN and KEITH Collins | Published Nov. 2, 2019 | New York Times | Posted November 2, 2019 |

(**On the morning of Inauguration Day 2017, Donald J. Trump tweeted an opening message to the United States. What followed was a barrage of personal attacks, outrage and boasting, in a near-constant stream of more than 11,000 tweets over 33 months. At the beginning of his presidency, Mr. Trump tweeted about nine times per day.

In the past three months, President Trump’s tweets have spilled out at triple the rate he set in 2017.)

In the Oval Office, an annoyed President Trump ended an argument he was having with his aides. He reached into a drawer, took out his iPhone and threw it on top of the historic Resolute Desk:

“Do you want me to settle this right now?”

There was no missing Mr. Trump’s threat that day in early 2017, the aides recalled. With a tweet, he could fling a directive to the world, and there was nothing they could do about it.

When Mr. Trump entered office, Twitter was a political tool that had helped get him elected and a digital howitzer that he relished firing. In the years since, he has fully integrated Twitter into the very fabric of his administration, reshaping the nature of the presidency and presidential power.

After Turkey invaded northern Syria this past month, he crafted his response not only in White House meetings but also in a series of contradictory tweets. This summer, he announced increased tariffs on $300 billion worth of Chinese goods, using a tweet to deepen tensions between the two countries. And in March, Mr. Trump cast aside more than 50 years of American policy, tweeting his recognition of Israel’s sovereignty in the Golan Heights. He openly delighted in the reaction he provoked.

“Boom. I press it,” Mr. Trump recalled months later at a White House conference attended by conservative social media personalities, “and, within two seconds, ‘We have breaking news.’”

Early on, top aides wanted to restrain the president’s Twitter habit, even considering asking the company to impose a 15-minute delay on Mr. Trump’s messages. But 11,390 presidential tweets later, many administration officials and lawmakers embrace his Twitter obsession, flocking to his social media chief with suggestions. Policy meetings are hijacked when Mr. Trump gets an idea for a tweet, drawing in cabinet members and others for wordsmithing. And as a president often at war with his own bureaucracy, he deploys Twitter to break through logjams, overrule or humiliate recalcitrant advisers and pre-empt his staff.

“He needs to tweet like we need to eat,” Kellyanne Conway, his White House counselor, said in an interview.

In a presidency unlike any other, where Mr. Trump wakes to Twitter, goes to bed with it and is comforted by how much it revolves around him, the person he most often singled out for praise was himself — more than 2,000 times, according to an analysis by The New York Times.

President Trump is tweeting more than ever. The second week of October was his busiest, with 271 tweets. He regularly takes to Twitter to lash out at his perceived enemies. In fact, he attacks someone or something in more than half of his tweets. Most of these attacks occur in the early morning or later in the evening, when Mr. Trump is more likely to be without his advisers.

The Times examined Mr. Trump’s use of Twitter since taking office, reviewing all his tweets, retweets and followers, and interviewing nearly 50 current and former administration officials, lawmakers and Twitter executives and employees. What has emerged is a rich account, with new analysis, previously unreported episodes and fresh details of how the president exploits the platform to exert power.

No. of tweets ...

that

5,889 attacked someone or something

4,876 praised someone or something

2,405 attacked Democrats

2,065 attacked investigations

2,026. praised President Trump

1,710 promoted conspiracies

1,308 attacked news organizations

It is often by brute repetition. He has taken to Twitter to demand action 1,159 times on immigration and his border wall, a top priority, and 521 times on tariffs, another key agenda item. Twitter is an instrument of his foreign policy: He has praised dictators more than a hundred times, while complaining nearly twice as much about America’s traditional allies. Twitter is the Trump administration’s de facto personnel office: The chief executive has announced the departures of more than two dozen top officials, some fired by tweet.

More than half of the president’s posts — 5,889 — have been attacks; no other category even comes close. His targets include the Russia investigation, a Federal Reserve that won’t bow to his whims, previous administrations, entire cities that are led by Democrats, and adversaries from outspoken athletes to chief executives who displease him. Like no other modern president, Mr. Trump has publicly harangued businesses to advance his political goals and silence criticism, often with talk of government intervention. Using Twitter, he threatened “Saturday Night Live” with an investigation by the Federal Communications Commission and accused Amazon, led by Jeff Bezos, owner of The Washington Post, of cheating the United States Postal Service.

As much as anything, Twitter is the broadcast network for Mr. Trump’s parallel political reality — the “alternative facts” he has used to spread conspiracy theories, fake information and extremist content, including material that energizes some of his base.

Mr. Trump’s use of Twitter has accelerated sharply since the end of the special counsel’s Russia investigation and reached a new high as Democrats opened an impeachment inquiry, the analysis shows. He tweeted more than 500 times during the first two weeks of October, a pace that put him on track to triple his monthly average. (The Times analyzed Mr. Trump’s tweets through Oct. 15. The total by the end of the month reached 11,887.)

His more than 66 million Twitter followers have become his private polling service, offering what he sees as validation for his performance in office. But fewer than one-fifth of his followers are voting-age Americans, according to a Times analysis of Pew Research national surveys of adults who use Twitter.

The White House press office declined to comment for this article and turned down an interview request with the president. Now, as Mr. Trump anticipates a bitter re-election battle and faces an impeachment inquiry by Democrats, the stakes are higher than ever before, and Twitter even more central to his presidency.

His top campaign aides are embracing the outrage that Mr. Trump stirs with his tweets to reinforce his anti-establishment brand and strengthen his bond with the fiercely loyal supporters who propelled him into office. And as public backing for impeachment grows, the president is using the platform to build a defensive echo chamber.

Mr. Trump tweeted his first attack as president on his third day in office. He fired off more than 1,100 attacks over the next year. The most frequent targets of Mr. Trump’s ire are Democrats, news organizations and investigations — specifically the Russia and impeachment inquiries.

Mr. Trump’s attack on four Democratic congresswomen of color in July received a lot of attention, and blowback. It was not the first time he had used Twitter to attack minority groups — and it would not be the last.

The president has tweeted more attacks so far this year than in the previous two years combined. In total, he has attacked at least 630 people and things in 5,889 tweets since taking office.

While people around Mr. Trump acknowledge that his tweets can cause political damage, the president is confident in his mastery of Twitter.

This past week, as he announced that American Special Forces had killed Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the leader of the Islamic State, Mr. Trump noted the terror group’s digital prowess. “They use the internet better than almost anybody in the world,” he said. “Perhaps other than Donald Trump.”

POLICY via TWITTER

With a single tweet last fall, Mr. Trump sent his administration into a tailspin. “I must, in the strongest of terms, ask Mexico to stop this onslaught,” he wrote in October 2018, angry about a caravan of migrants from Central America. “If unable to do so I will call up the U.S. Military and CLOSE OUR SOUTHERN BORDER!”

Mr. Trump’s aides had tried for weeks to talk him out of shutting down the border — the logistics would be impossible and the economic pain extreme. The tweet prompted an emergency meeting down the hall from the Oval Office as aides scrambled to head off Mr. Trump’s impulse, according to people familiar with the frantic scene. Like others in this article, they spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of angering the president.

The aides succeeded in temporarily holding him off, but the tweet crystallized for cautious bureaucrats exactly what he wanted: to stop people from coming into the country. In the months that followed, Mr. Trump’s threat helped to set off an effort inside the government to find ever more restrictive ways to block immigrants. Nearly six months later, Kirstjen Nielsen, the homeland security secretary, was still trying to prevent a border shutdown when the president brought her resistance to an end.

“Kirstjen Nielsen,” he tweeted, “will be leaving her position.”

This is governing in the Trump era. For President Barack Obama, a tweet about a presidential proposal might mark the conclusion of a long, deliberative process. For Mr. Trump, Twitter is often the beginning of how policy is made.

“Suddenly there’s a tweet, and everything gets upended and you spent the week trying to defend something else,” said Representative Peter King, Republican of New York. “This person thrives on chaos. What we may find disconcerting or upsetting or whatever, it is actually what keeps him going.”

In October 2017, Rex W. Tillerson, the president’s first secretary of state, was in China with a team of diplomats negotiating sanctions on Kim Jong-un, the North Korean leader, when Mr. Trump weighed in on Twitter. Mr. Tillerson was “wasting his time trying to negotiate with Little Rocket Man,” he wrote. “Save your energy Rex, we’ll do what has to be done!”

Two months later, a Reuters headline blared that Mick Mulvaney, who then was Mr. Trump’s new pick to lead the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, had decided to put “on ice” sanctions against Wells Fargo for consumer abuses. It was little surprise: Mr. Mulvaney was an ally of the financial industry. But Mr. Trump had other ideas.

“Fines and penalties against Wells Fargo Bank for their bad acts against their customers and others will not be dropped, as has incorrectly been reported, but will be pursued and, if anything, substantially increased,” he tweeted.

Political appointees at the bureau wanted to affirm Mr. Trump’s desire publicly, despite longstanding policies against commenting on active investigations, according to former officials there. A spokesman for Mr. Mulvaney issued a statement saying only that he “shares the president’s firm commitment to punishing bad actors and protecting American consumers.”

According to two people with direct knowledge of the Wells Fargo inquiry, career bureau officials took Mr. Trump’s outburst as a green light to pursue aggressive negotiations with the bank, even as Mr. Mulvaney’s team prepared to dial back penalties in other cases or shelve them. Wells Fargo ultimately agreed to a billion-dollar federal settlement, the bureau’s largest-ever civil penalty.

Over time, Mr. Trump has turned Twitter into a means of presidential communication as vital as a statement from the White House press secretary or an Oval Office address. The press secretary has not held a daily on-camera press briefing — a decades-long ritual of presidential messaging — since March. Instead, Mr. Trump’s Twitter activity drives the day.

And Mr. Trump has removed any doubt that his tweets carry the weight once reserved for more formal pronouncements.

In summer 2018, his aides repeatedly tried to reassure Republican lawmakers that the president backed their hard-line immigration bill, despite his remarks suggesting otherwise. But privately, Mr. Trump told several senators that there was only one certain sign of his support.

“If I don’t tweet it,” he said, according to two former senior advisers, “don’t listen to my staff.”

ADAPTING A PLATFORM

When Mr. Trump entered office, aides were determined to rein in his itchy Twitter fingers.

In a series of informal conversations in early 2017, top White House officials discussed the possibility of a 15-minute delay on the president’s account, a technical change not unlike the five-second naughty-word system used by television networks. But, one former senior official said, they quickly abandoned the idea after recognizing the political peril if it leaked to the press — or to their boss.

Several weeks later, a trio of close advisers presented Mr. Trump with another idea. Gary Cohn, the top economic adviser; Hope Hicks, the president’s director of strategic communications; and Rob Porter, his staff secretary, argued that they should see the tweets before he sent them out.

Mr. Trump was skeptical, worrying that delayed tweets would be irrelevant, according to a former White House official. But he agreed to a weeklong trial. Within 72 hours, the president had resumed tweeting from his golf club in Bedminster, N.J.

Three thousand miles away, in Silicon Valley, similar conversations were unfolding at Twitter’s offices, where executives faced the same dilemma as Mr. Trump’s inner circle: whether, and how, to restrain him.

At the time, Twitter lagged far behind larger competitors like Facebook. While popular among politicians and journalists, it was struggling financially. But the president’s incessant tweeting gave the company more currency.

His Twitter account often drove more “impressions” — a key company metric — than any other in the world. But some of his messages seemed to violate the company’s policies against abuse and incitement.

Less than a month into his presidency, Mr. Trump tweeted that Democrats made up Russian interference in the 2016 election to justify Hillary Clinton’s loss. He then accused Mr. Obama of illegally wiretapping Trump Tower during the campaign. Many of the president’s tweets promoted conspiracy theories or tried to erode faith in democratic institutions.

On his sixth day in office, he advanced the false claim that millions of people voted illegally in the 2016 election, depriving him of a popular-vote majority. He has tweeted 40 times about voter fraud and a “rigged” electoral system.

He has since sown doubt about Russian interference and the resulting investigations in more than 1,400 tweets. Mr. Trump has also used Twitter to attack the credibility of journalists, intelligence agencies and the judicial system. He has spoken of a nefarious “deep state” undermining his presidency, a judiciary that puts the country in “peril” and a news media that is “the enemy of the people,” a phrase historically used by autocrats.

The president also pushed unfounded claims that Big Tech is biased against conservatives (102 tweets), stoked fears that caravans of migrants were going to “invade” the United States (43 tweets), and questioned the number of people killed in Puerto Rico as a result of Hurricane Maria (5 tweets). All told, Mr. Trump tweeted conspiratorial language more than 1,700 times.

On a now-defunct internal company message board known as Twitter Buzz, some left-leaning employees favored barring the president. Mr. Trump’s behavior came up at almost every all-hands gathering and at many smaller meetings of executives. Some of them had set their phones to alert them whenever the president tweeted, according to a former employee who spoke on the condition of confidentiality.

“What I saw was a company coming to grips with an entirely new situation, a new level of scrutiny, a new level of vitriol,” said Dianna Colasurdo, a former account executive on Twitter’s political advertising sales team, “and working to adapt their policies in the moment to align with that.”

A turning point came in fall 2017, at the height of tensions with North Korea, when Mr. Trump tweeted that the rogue nation might not “be around much longer!” The country’s foreign minister called that a declaration of war. On Twitter, users wondered if the company would allow Mr. Trump to tweet his way into a nuclear conflict.

The response came the next day. Referring back to Mr. Trump’s online declaration, Twitter announced in a tweet that it took “newsworthiness” into account when evaluating whether to remove a post that violated its policies.

In an interview, Twitter executives said that newsworthiness had long figured into the company’s internal enforcement guidelines and that officials there had been formulating the announcement, which applied worldwide, months before Mr. Trump’s North Korea tweet. But former employees said they understood the announcement to be Trump-driven. Twitter did not want to be in the business of censoring the president.

Late in summer 2018, White House insiders tried again to curb Mr. Trump’s use of social media, according to two former aides. After a series of over-the-top weeks of tweeting — including calling Omarosa Manigault Newman, his onetime aide, “wacky” and “a lowlife” — several advisers suggested he go just two days without Twitter and see what happened. Mr. Trump nodded, and then promptly discarded the advice.

Mr. King, who said most of his Republican colleagues wished the president would tweet less, added that whenever he had raised the issue with White House staff members, they shrugged helplessly.

“It’s not going to stop,” he recalled their saying. “Forget it; we’ve all tried.”

Soon enough, Mr. Trump was as prolific as ever.

On Sept. 13, he mocked Jamie Dimon, the chief executive of JPMorgan Chase, for claiming he could beat Mr. Trump in an election. “He doesn’t have the aptitude or ‘smarts’ & is a poor public speaker & nervous mess,” the president tweeted. Over the next 12 hours, Mr. Trump attacked two former F.B.I. officials, accused The Wall Street Journal of getting a tariff story wrong and blasted former Secretary of State John Kerry for holding “illegal meetings” with Iran.

“BAD!” he wrote.

FIRST THINGS FIRST

Mr. Trump’s Twitter habit is most intense in the morning, when he is in the White House residence, watching Fox News, scrolling through his Twitter mentions and turning the social media platform into what one aide called the “ultimate weapon of mass dissemination.”

Of the attack tweets identified in the Times analysis, nearly half were sent between 6 a.m. and 10 a.m., hours that Mr. Trump spends mostly without advisers present.

After waking early, Mr. Trump typically watches news shows recorded the previous night on his “Super TiVo,” several DVRs connected to a single remote. (The devices are set to record “Lou Dobbs Tonight” on Fox Business Network; “Hannity,” “Tucker Carlson Tonight” and “The Story With Martha MacCallum” on Fox News; and “Anderson Cooper 360” on CNN.)

He takes in those shows, and the “Fox & Friends” morning program, then flings out comments on his iPhone. Then he watches as his tweets reverberate on cable channels and news sites.

The symbiotic relationship between Mr. Trump and Fox News is apparent through the president’s tweets. In fact, he praised the network in his first tweet on the first morning he woke up in the White House. He has since praised and promoted the network, individual shows and conservative news media personalities more than 750 times.

Over all, at least 15 percent of the content in Mr. Trump’s tweets seemed to come directly from Fox News and other conservative media outlets.

Early on Sept. 2 — the start of a week in which he tweeted 198 times — the president sent a few benign tweets, then lashed out at Paul Krugman as a “Failing New York Times columnist” who “never got it!” Over the next 44 minutes, he fired off 10 more tweets. He disparaged Richard Trumka, the president of the A.F.L.-C.I.O. (“Likes what we are doing until the cameras go on.”) He called James B. Comey, the former F.B.I. director, and his “dwindling group of friends” liars and traitors. He railed against The Washington Post and four women of color in Congress who called themselves “the Squad.”

Almost every morning that week, Mr. Trump kicked off the day with an attack on one critic or another: the “incompetent Mayor of London,” or “Bad ‘actress’ Debra The Mess Messing” — whom he accused of being racist — or the “Fake News Media.” He referred to conservative media outlets 45 times, berated the mainstream media 32 times and tweeted about conspiracy theories 12 times.

Sometimes the president’s apparent fury on Twitter is meant to troll his critics and get a rise out of them, many of his closest aides said. But they still brace themselves, knowing that they are likely to be blindsided by one of his tweets. Aides who gather for the early-morning staff meetings in the West Wing said their agenda was regularly blown up when their phones simultaneously went off with a tweet from the boss.

Once Mr. Trump arrives in the West Wing — usually after 10 a.m. — Dan Scavino, the White House social media director, takes control of the Twitter account, tweeting as @realDonaldTrump from his own phone or computer. Mr. Trump rarely tweets in front of others, those close to him say, because he does not like to wear the reading glasses he needs to see the screen.

Instead, the president dictates tweets to Mr. Scavino, who sits in a closet-size room just off the Oval Office until Mr. Trump calls out “Scavino!” Often, he prints out suggested tweets in extra-large fonts for the president to sign off on. (A single-page article that Mr. Scavino recently printed out for him ran to six pages after the fonts were enlarged, according to one person who saw it.)

Mr. Scavino’s role in Mr. Trump’s Twitter machine has made him an unlikely White House power broker and the go-to person for aides, business executives, friends and lawmakers who want the president to tweet something. Ms. Conway noted what she called the hypocrisy of many Republicans who begged her to get Mr. Trump to stop tweeting during the 2016 campaign and now come to Mr. Scavino with suggestions. Mr. Scavino declined to be interviewed for this article.

He sometimes acts as a brake — or tries to — on the president’s tweeting impulses. When Mr. Trump started angrily posting about the “Squad,” Mr. Scavino told him it was a bad idea, according to an aide who witnessed the conversation. Along with Michael Dubke, who served as White House communications director for several months in 2017 and is from Buffalo, home of the famous chicken wings, Mr. Scavino presented some tweets to Mr. Trump in degrees of outrageousness: “hot,” “medium” or “mild.” Mr. Trump, said one former official who saw the proposed messages, always picked the most incendiary ones and often wanted to make them even more provocative.

And while many of Mr. Trump’s tweets are shoot-from-the-hip attacks, he chews over others for days or even weeks, waiting for just the right moment to maximize the reaction, aides say.

He plotted for days to tweet about Mika Brzezinski, the liberal co-host of the popular MSNBC morning program, according to former White House officials, before finally posting one morning in June 2017. He called her “low I.Q. Crazy Mika” and wrote that she had been “bleeding badly from a face-lift” during a New Year’s Eve party.

In October of last year, the president started telling his aides that he planned to denounce Stormy Daniels, a pornographic-film actress who claimed to have had an affair with him more than a decade earlier. He said he wanted to call her a “horse face.”

Several current and former aides recalled telling Mr. Trump that it was a terrible idea and would renew accusations of misogyny against him. But he persisted.

Finally, after watching a Fox News report days later about how a federal judge had thrown out a lawsuit by Ms. Daniels, the president tapped out the tweet.

“Great, now I can go after Horseface and her 3rd rate lawyer in the Great State of Texas,” he wrote.

A LOVE OF ‘LIKES’

For Mr. Trump, Twitter reinforces his instincts about his performance as president.

After a rally in Dallas in mid-October, Mr. Trump’s aides prepared a large-type printout of tweets gushing over his speech that day, including one from Tomi Lahren, a Fox News commentator and the host of a show on the Fox Nation site. Mr. Trump scrawled a thank-you note on one copy to Ms. Lahren — who then tweeted a picture of the letter back at the president.

Aides said they often compiled positive feedback for Mr. Trump. He revels in the stream of praise from his most loyal followers, on paper or as he scrolls through his phone early in the morning and late at night. He considers his following to be like the ratings on a TV show, better than any approval poll. After one weekend Twitter spree, the president told Sarah Huckabee Sanders, his press secretary at the time, he had expected a tweet he was particularly proud of to get more response than it did, according to a former administration official. Ms. Sanders said that if he tweeted 60 times, people wouldn’t pay as much attention, the official said.

TWITTER vs. REALITY

The polling firm YouGov asks Americans to rate Mr. Trump’s tweets every day. Tweets that get the most likes on Twitter tend to be more poorly received by the American public, while those with lower engagement tend to be viewed more positively.

The president is keenly aware of his number of followers and reluctant to acknowledge that any of them are not real. Mr. Trump has accused Twitter of political bias for its periodic purges of bot accounts across the platform, which have cost him — and other prominent users — hundreds of thousands of followers. When he met with the company’s chief executive, Jack Dorsey, in April, Mr. Trump reportedly pressed him at length about the lost followers.

There is plenty of evidence that Mr. Trump’s Twitter following may not be a reliable proxy for what the American people think of the job he is doing.

It is difficult, if not impossible, to determine with certainty how many of Mr. Trump’s more than 66 million followers are fake. Some studies of his followers have estimated that a high proportion are likely to be automated bots, fake accounts or inactive. But even a conservative analysis by The Times found that nearly a third of them, about 22 million, included no biographical information and used the service’s default profile image — two signs the accounts may be rarely used or inactive. Fourteen percent have automatically generated user names, another indication that an account may not belong to a real person.

Even if Mr. Trump is not shouting into the void on Twitter, he is often preaching to the converted. Data from Stirista, an analytics firm, shows that his followers tend to be the kind of users who are most likely to be his supporters — disproportionately older, white and male compared with Twitter users over all.

And they constitute just a fraction of the electorate. According to the Times analysis of Pew data, only about four percent of American adults, or about 11 million people, follow him on Twitter. Those followers represent less that one-fifth of his total, the analysis shows.

According to data from YouGov, which polls about most of the president’s tweets, some of the topics on which Mr. Trump got the most likes and retweets — jabs at the N.F.L., posts about the special counsel’s investigation, unfounded allegations of widespread voter fraud — poll poorly with the general public.

But people close to Mr. Trump said there was no dissuading him that the “likes” a tweet got were evidence that a decision or policy proposal was well received.

Last December, after Mr. Trump announced plans to withdraw some troops from Syria, lawmakers came to the White House to argue against it. According to Politico, Mr. Trump responded by calling in Mr. Scavino.

“Tell them how popular my policy is,” Mr. Trump asked Mr. Scavino, who described for the lawmakers social media postings that had praised Mr. Trump’s decision. Aides said that for Mr. Trump, his Twitter “likes” were proof that he had made the right call.

The reaction in the outside world was far less favorable. Within weeks, Mr. Trump’s defense secretary and the special anti-ISIS envoy quit over the decision. American allies were enraged. More than two-thirds of the Senate voted to rebuke Mr. Trump, who agreed under pressure to keep the troops in Syria.

Almost a year later, American troops in Syria became an issue again after Mr. Trump appeared to give President Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey a green light to invade Kurdish-controlled areas in northern Syria.

That resulted in another congressional rebuke for Mr. Trump and complaints even from loyal Republican allies. In subsequent days, Mr. Trump sought to defend himself on Twitter, alternately denying he had abandoned the Kurds and suggesting the United States had no stake in their safety, threatening Mr. Erdogan if the incursion continued and praising Turkey as an important trading partner.

Many people took note of the back-and-forth, including Mr. Erdogan. “When we take a look at Mr. Trump’s Twitter posts, we can no longer follow them,” the Turkish president told reporters mockingly in mid-October, according to Hurriyet, a Turkish newspaper. “We cannot keep track.”

A TOOL FOR RE-ELECTION

In the months ahead, the man tasked with winning Mr. Trump a second term is hoping to focus the president’s Twitter habit on its original purpose: connecting with voters.

Brad Parscale, who served as Mr. Trump’s digital director in 2016 and is now campaign manager, has worked closely with Mr. Scavino to shape perceptions of the president through social media. The two men speak a half-dozen times a day, according to people familiar with their interactions.

Mr. Parscale criticized Twitter after it announced on Wednesday that it would no longer allow paid political advertising on the platform, calling it “yet another attempt to silence conservatives.” But the change may benefit Mr. Trump: He has a far larger organic Twitter following than any of his likely Democratic opponents, and is therefore less reliant on paid ads to spread his message through the platform.

While some campaign aides say Mr. Trump’s tweets can be a distraction, they also view Twitter as an essential tool to present him as someone strong, willing to stand up to so-called political elites and what the president recently called the “unholy alliance of corrupt Democrat politicians, deep-state bureaucrats and the fake-news media.”

The aides seek to cultivate the image of a man who understands “regular people.” Mr. Trump’s team believes that his unvarnished writing, poor punctuation and increasing profanity on Twitter signals authenticity — a contrast to the polished, vetted, often anodyne social media style of most candidates.

Twitter, Ms. Conway said, is the president’s most potent weapon when it comes to bypassing the powerful people he believes have controlled the flow of information too long.

“It’s the democratization of information,” she said. Everyone receives Mr. Trump’s tweets at once — the stay-at-home mom, the plumber working on the sink, the billionaire executive, the White House correspondent.

“They all hear ‘ping,’” she said, “at the same time.”

______

The New York Times reviewed every tweet and retweet sent by President Trump from Jan. 20, 2017, through Oct. 15, 2019. Each one was evaluated and tagged for several factors: whether it included an attack or praise; who or what was attacked or praised; and for topics including trade, immigration, the military, the economy, the 2018 midterm elections, the Russia investigation and the House impeachment inquiry. In the Times analysis, retweets in each of those categories were counted as tweets.

The Times reviewed each Twitter account that followed Mr. Trump by analyzing profile information, tweet frequency and the date the account was created. The Times also used data from Pew Research to estimate how many American adults follow Mr. Trump on Twitter. Pew Research conducted a nationally representative sample of American adults with personal, public Twitter accounts to analyze how many follow American politicians.

Sources: Trump Twitter Archive, Internet Archive, Politwoops, Census Bureau, Pew Research

Reporting was contributed by Rich Harris, Blacki Migliozzi, Matthew Rosenberg and Rachel Shorey. Produced by Gray Beltran, Rumsey Taylor and Jon Huang. Additional graphics by Guilbert Gates.

🍁🏈🍻🍁🏈🍻🍁🏈🍻🍁🏈🍻🍁

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unrar · 5 years

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“It also means voting, even in an imperfect system. Voting remains the key tool of legitimacy for any government. If it didn’t matter, it wouldn’t be so much under attack. Even dictatorships hold mock votes, because “we won the election” remains the strongest argument for legitimacy of rule. Voting is so powerful that even a hollowed-out version holds sway.

But overhauling the electoral infrastructure has to be a priority. The voting process should be overseen by nonpartisan officials or monitored through an adversarial process (with input from representatives of all parties). Recently, the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine released a comprehensive study, “Securing the Vote,” which offers extensive practical recommendations. Luckily, fewer and fewer electronic voting machines remain in use around the country; they should be replaced with optical-scan ballots. Meaningful audit processes should be instituted nationwide. States need federal money to upgrade their voting machines, train their poll workers and secure and upgrade their pollbooks (which maintain voter identification information).

Paradoxically, the crumbling, mismatched and patchwork nature of our electoral infrastructure makes it unlikely that we will see large-scale computerized hacking that alters the political landscape. The failure to vote because of cynicism and mistrust is the bigger threat to the integrity of our elections.

To fix that, we need to elect politicians whose platforms include the need for demonstrably fair elections. And that requires voting — warts, failings and everything else aside. Sometimes, working with what you have, rather than surrendering to cynicism, is the only strategy.”

#elections #us elections #senate

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theliberaltony · 5 years

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via FiveThirtyEight tells compelling data-driven stories about politics, sports and science.

It took a while, but President Trump’s second State of the Union address is finally here. From one perspective, the fact that it’s happening is more important than the speech itself — it was nearly the casualty of a fight between Trump and House Democrats over funding a wall on the U.S.-Mexico border. Tensions remain high as Congress and the president work toward a Feb. 15 deadline to avert another government shutdown. Trump’s address starts at 9 p.m. Eastern time tonight, and we’ll be live blogging our thoughts in real time at FiveThirtyEight.com. First, though, let’s talk a little bit about how State of the Union addresses work and what you can expect this evening.

1. The speeches don’t affect approval ratings much

State of the Union addresses are generally meant as laundry lists of legislation for Congress to pursue — not soaring examples of oratory like presidential acceptance speeches. So it makes sense that, unlike political conventions, State of the Union addresses don’t produce a polling “bounce” for the president — but nor do they take much of a toll. In most cases, their political impact is close to nil.

Gallup has measured presidential job approval ratings both before and after State of the Union speeches since 1978 (for a total of 35, not including the addresses before a joint session of Congress that newly elected presidents gave in their first year in office1). If you look at the difference between those pre- and post-speech approval ratings, the State of the Union has produced an average approval-rating bump of … 0.2 percent. In fact, a president has been just as likely to see his approval rating decrease as increase: 15 speeches have produced an approval rating bump, while 15 have yielded a decline (the remaining five effected no change at all).

How the State of the Union affects presidential approval

Approval rating before and after the speech Year President Before After Change 1998 Clinton 59% 69% +10 1996 Clinton 46 52 +6 2005 W. Bush 51 57 +6 1994 Clinton 54 58 +4 2016 Obama 45 49 +4 1984 Reagan 52 55 +3 2015 Obama 45 48 +3 1980 Carter 56 58 +2 1995 Clinton 47 49 +2 2012 Obama 44 46 +2 2018 Trump 38 40 +2 1988 Reagan 49 50 +1 1992 H.W. Bush 46 47 +1 2003 W. Bush 60 61 +1 2014 Obama 41 42 +1 1982 Reagan 47 47 0 1999 Clinton 69 69 0 2008 W. Bush 34 34 0 2010 Obama 48 48 0 2011 Obama 50 50 0 1979 Carter 43 42 -1 1986 Reagan 64 63 -1 1991 H.W. Bush 83 82 -1 2000 Clinton 64 63 -1 2006 W. Bush 43 42 -1 1983 Reagan 37 35 -2 2002 W. Bush 84 82 -2 2013 Obama 52 50 -2 1978 Carter 55 52 -3 1997 Clinton 60 57 -3 1985 Reagan 64 60 -4 2004 W. Bush 53 49 -4 2007 W. Bush 36 32 -4 1987 Reagan 48 43 -5 1990 H.W. Bush 80 73 -7 Average change +0.2 Median change 0 Average absolute change 2.5 Median absolute change 2

2018 ratings are based on weekly Gallup polls, whereas other years are based on rolling daily averages.

Source: Gallup

Even when a president’s approval rating has increased or declined in the period immediately following a State of the Union, the shift usually isn’t big. The average absolute change (e.g., treating a 4-point dip like a 4-point rise) has been 2.5 percentage points. Presidential approval ratings have budged by more than 4 points in either direction after only five of the 35 speeches, and in those cases, it’s often easier to attribute the shifts to outside events. For example, the 2005 State of the Union came a few days after Iraq’s first democratic election in half a century, which reflected well on President George W. Bush’s Iraq policy.

That should make political analysts think twice when assessing the impact of tonight’s speech. Say Trump’s speech goes well and his approval rating is up 5 points a week from now. Pundits might try to connect the two, but history tells us that the State of Union probably wouldn’t be the reason behind that increase. That said, don’t be surprised if Trump’s approval rating does improve in the next few weeks regardless of how the speech is received. He is probably due for an uptick — his approval rating fell substantially during the recent government shutdown, but the polling effects of a shutdown have historically been short-lived.

2. The speeches don’t influence legislation

Presidents use State of the Union addresses to lay out their policy priorities and persuade Congress to pass them, but they are typically successful at only the first of those objectives. According to political scientists Donna Hoffman and Alison Howard, the average State of the Union from 1965 to 2015 (plus those pesky joint addresses to Congress2) contained 34 policy proposals.

But the share of those proposals that became law within a year of being included in an address varied. On average, Hoffman and Howard found that only about 25 percent of the president’s ideas were fully enacted within a year.3

It’s particularly difficult for a president to get his agenda passed when his party doesn’t control Congress. For example, 33 percent of the proposals in Barack Obama’s 2009 speech and 49 percent of those in his 2010 speech were fully implemented by the Democrat-controlled 111th Congress, but Obama’s success rate dropped when control of Congress was split between Republicans and Democrats from 2011 through 2014. On average, 14 percent of Obama’s proposals in his speeches in those four years were fully implemented within a year. That doesn’t bode well for Trump’s proposals — one month into the 116th Congress, Trump and House Democrats already have an extremely adversarial relationship.

3. Presidents end up speaking to their own party

Although the audience for the State of the Union is theoretically all Americans, viewership of the event has had a decidedly partisan gleam. For both of Trump’s previous addresses to Congress, more self-identified Republicans than Democrats watched, according to polls that were conducted after the speeches. And we can probably expect more of the same in 2019. People from the president’s party usually have been more interested in hearing what he has to say since at least the end of the George H.W. Bush administration:4

While it’s unlikely that this trend will change tonight — after all, Trump is the most polarizing president on record — voters of all stripes may want to hear what the president has to say in the aftermath of the longest government shutdown in history and as the standoff over the border wall funding continues. Others may have been drawn in by the dispute over when the State of the Union would take place.

4. But the speeches are part of an important democratic tradition

The importance of the State of the Union in affecting policy or public opinion may be overblown, but it does provide a unique opportunity for the president to speak simultaneously to the public and to Congress. And even though the president is the focal point, the address is really about a president’s legislative agenda, which Congress has the power to enact (or not). Members of both parties sit in the same room and listen to the president. Occasionally, they find common ground. More often than not, they disagree. But a president laying out his or her priorities before Congress is a powerful symbolic reminder that the presidency and legislature are coequal branches of government.

The State of the Union also provides a sense of historical continuity. The address has been either delivered to Congress or submitted as a written annual message nearly every year since George Washington assumed office. And while the televised prime-time address dates only to the 1960s, it does put Trump in the company of former presidents like Lyndon Johnson, Ronald Reagan and more recent predecessors like George W. Bush and Obama. By participating in this ritualized address, presidents signal that they are part of history and that the office transcends any single president.

Whether Trump adheres to the usual script tonight or does something, well, Trump-like, the format and setting of the address will push viewers to think about how he fills the office in comparison to past leaders. And at a time when there’s a lot of disagreement over policy, it’s good for the president to go before the American people to make his case, subjecting himself to both public scrutiny and opposing viewpoints. The State of the Union isn’t perfect, but it’s better than the president speaking to the public without Congress present — or, even worse, not speaking at all.

#IFTTT #FiveThirtyEight tells compelling data-driven stories about politics #sports and science.#pol

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