Fascinating — and scary — piece of research reported in the Washington Post. On Sunday and Monday, YouGov surveyed 1,388 American adults. Researchers showed half of them this crowd picture from each inauguration and asked which was from Trump’s inauguration and which was from Obama’s. The other half were simply asked which picture shows more people.
Simple, eh? Well, guess what?
As I said the other day, my American friends are strangely confident that the Constitution will eventually keep Trump under control.
I wonder…
In the meantime, consider this sobering assessment by two academic lawyers in today’s New York Times:
When President Trump declared on Saturday that reporters are “among the most dishonest human beings on earth,” it was not the first time he had disparaged the press. Nor was it out of character when, later that same day, his press secretary threatened “to hold the press accountable” for reporting truthful information that was unflattering to Mr. Trump. Episodes like these have become all too common in recent weeks. So it’s comforting to know that the Constitution serves as a reliable stronghold against Mr. Trump’s assault on the press.
Except that it doesn’t. The truth is, legal protections for press freedom are far feebler than you may think. Even more worrisome, they have been weakening in recent years…
For example, the First Amendment offers no protection to journalists who are hounded and harassed by mobs dispatched by Trump and his minions.
Journalism is about to become a dangerous profession in the United States.
Last Sunday’s Observer column:
If you ever want to annoy western policymakers or politicians, then here is a surefire way to do it. Tell them that the only government in the world that really understands the internet is the Chinese communist regime. And if you want to add a killer punch, add the assertion that almost everything we think we know about Chinese management of the net is either banal (all that stuff about the great firewall, paranoia about keywords such as “Falun Gong”, “democracy”, etc) or just plain wrong. Having thus lit the fuse, retreat to a safe distance and enjoy the ensuing outburst of righteous indignation.
For the avoidance of doubt, this is not an apologia for the Chinese regime, which is as nasty and illiberal as they come. But it’s best to have a realistic view of one’s adversaries. China’s leaders have invented a new way of running society. It’s been christened “networked authoritarianism” by Rebecca MacKinnon, a noted scholar of these things. President Xi Jinping and his colleagues are followers of Boris Johnson in at least one respect: they believe that it is possible to have one’s cake and eat it too…
From Martin Wolf in today’s Financial Times.
From Dave Pell:
The peaceful transfer of power that is an American hallmark took place at noon on Friday as Donald Trump became the forty-fifth President of the United States. Though I’ve been a prolific critic of Trump, I’ve never been one to join the “not my president” chant, and I was planning to lead with a hopeful message on a solemn day. But Forty-Five opened his tenure with a divisive campaign speech masquerading as an inaugural address. It was pointedly offensive to the former presidents behind him, presented a warped and hopeless version of American carnage, and delivered a harsh, off-putting and grim message to our allies abroad. Donald Trump has surprised us at every turn during this political process. And he surprised even his harshest critics today, on the downside. (On the plus side, it’s been about an hour and there’s been no nuclear war. So those who bet the over won.)
Watching the video of Trump’s Inaugural Address, with its authoritarian tone and its totalitarian undertones, what came to mind was a famous story about Benjamin Franklin. At the close of the Constitutional Convention of 1787, a woman came up to him as he left Independence Hall on the final day of deliberation and said: “Well, Doctor, what have we got — a Republic or a Monarchy?” To which Franklin replied: “A Republic, if you can keep it.”
There’s been a lot of brave talk from my American friends — especially the lawyers — on how the framers of the Constitution always feared the arrival of a demagogue, and designed the institutions of the state to rein such a president in. All those wonderful checks and balances, separation of powers, etc.
Well, now they’re going to get a real stress-test.
Trump has declared his intention to keep tweeting when he’s president. But Twitter accounts are easy to hack. Ponder the implications. Luckily, some people are doing just that. Joseph Berstein is one. “The most powerful publication in the world today”, he writes,
is Donald Trump’s personal Twitter account. In the past six weeks, it has moved markets, conducted shadow foreign policy, and reshaped the focus of media around the world. Just today, it caused Toyota’s stock to drop. It is also shockingly insecure.
That insecurity was acceptable when @realDonaldTrump concerned itself with Kristen Stewart cheating on Robert Pattinson and how thin people don’t drink Diet Coke. And yet Trump’s newfound influence — combined with the unpredictability of his tweets — makes the president-elect’s account a particularly tempting target for hackers.
That’s especially true because there is a large fortune that could be made in a single 140-character message. If someone were able to gain access to Trump’s Twitter, they could tweet approvingly or disapprovingly about a company (as Trump has done) and play the stock market accordingly — or cause others to do so. A market-tracking app called Trigger has already set up an alert that responds whenever Trump tweets about publicly traded companies.
If the hacker were geopolitically motivated, they could tweet favorably or unfavorably about a country or a leader (as Trump has done) and alter foreign affairs. Or if the hacker had a grudge, they could call their enemy out in a tweet (as Trump has done) and unleash the rage of Trump’s nearly 19 million followers. Plus, who knows what’s in Trump’s DMs?
And precisely because the president-elect’s tweets are so far afield of current president Barack Obama’s on-message, workshopped ones, someone with improper access to Trump’s account could accomplish their goals while staying in character as Trump. (A hack of the Associated Press Twitter account in 2013 that falsely asserted breaking news about an explosion at the White House caused the Dow to drop 150 points.)
Since Trump seems pathologically adverse to taking advice (because he always knows best, you see) it’s difficult to imagine him being persuaded to abandon Twitter. So is there a possible fix?
Conor Friedersdorf, writing in The Atlantic, thinks there is:
With a president who has trained the world to treat his Twitter feed as the most direct expression of his mind and of the actions he intends to take, that is unacceptable. The Trump team may have safeguards in mind, or cooperate with whatever the folks at the White House Communications Agency recommend. But given the government’s poor track record with information security, there is no reason to leave the matter entirely in their hands. Twitter’s CEO has a responsibility to impose an additional safeguard. And doing so shouldn’t be difficult.
Going forward, the @POTUS account and any verified account belonging to the sitting president should lose the ability to post anything instantaneously to the Internet.
Instead, those accounts should post to a queue. Twitter should then send the tweet in question to a designated official, perhaps White House Chief of Staff Reince Priebus, who will be prompted, “Can you verify that POTUS wants to tweet this?” And 10 seconds or 20 minutes or 2 hours later, with that “authentication” process complete, the tweet could be published to the stream as before.
This approach, or a smarter alternative, would impose trivial costs and could have almost incalculable benefits.
Will Trump accept something like this? Stay tuned.
Lovely diary piece by the Guardian‘s Peter Bradshaw:
What a very lively occasion the presidential inauguration is going to be – very far, in all probability, from the “soft sensuality” whimsically described by his press team. PEOTUS has excitedly tweeted: “People are pouring into Washington in record numbers. Bikers for Trump are on their way!” Erm … Bikers for Trump? Could it be that Mr Trump is encouraging these free spirits and easy riders to show up with a view to, um, balancing out the protest contingent? Their website announces: “Bikers For Trump™ believes in the first amendment of the United States and believes in the People’s peaceful right to demonstrate and protest, however we denounce protesters being paid and provided [sic] untruthful propaganda …” I think that gives us a pretty good idea of the limits to anti-Trump free speech envisioned by Bikers For Trump, and exactly how any confrontation is going to go down. I found myself reaching for my DVD copy of the classic documentary Gimme Shelter by the Maysles brothers about the Rolling Stones’ 1969 Altamont concert, in which Hells Angels provided security in return for free beer. The mood turned ugly, as the bikers responded to crowd disorder with aggression and violence and finally stabbed an audience member who had pulled a gun. Perhaps Mr Trump’s team should study Gimme Shelter before the proceedings start.
As Bradshaw says, what could to wrong?
Illustration by James Melaugh/Observer
This morning’s Observer column:
I bought it [the Echo] because it seemed to me that it might be a significant product and I have a policy of never writing about kit that I haven’t paid for myself. Having lived with the Echo for a few weeks I can definitely confirm its significance. It is a big deal, which explains why the company invested so much in it. (It’s said that 1,500 people worked on the project for four years, which sounds implausible until you remember that Apple has 800 people working on the iPhone’s camera alone). Amazon’s boss, Jeff Bezos, may not have bet the ranch on it (he has a pretty big ranch, after all) but the product nevertheless represents a significant investment. And the sales so far suggest that it may well pay off.
Once switched on and hooked up to one’s wifi network, the Echo sits there, listening for its trigger word, “Alexa”. So initially one feels like an idiot saying things such as: “Alexa, play Radio 4” or: “Alexa, who is Kim Kardashian?” (A genuine inquiry this, from a visitor who didn’t know the answer, which duly came in the form of Alexa reading the first lines of the relevant Wikipedia entry.)
