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.

From the Quartz daily briefing.

“The World Economic Forum begins next week in Davos, where politicians, CEOs, celebrities meet to establish the conventional wisdom over fondue, cocktails, and high-minded debates.

The conventional wisdom at Davos this time last year was that Donald Trump wouldn’t win the Republican presidential nomination, let alone the presidency; the British would bottle out of voting for Brexit; globalization was good; the tides of free trade lifted all boats; politicians should tell at least a semblance of the truth; and diplomacy was an erudite and tactful endeavor. Justin Trudeau’s starry-eyed optimism set the tone.

It has always been easy to mock Davos for its out-of-touch elitism, with delegates swooping in on private helicopters to address big issues like climate change, income inequality, and the gender gap. The Davos consensus is rarely spot on. But its rejection in 2016 was epic and comprehensive. Brexit is on and Trump is in; globalization is on the retreat; nationalism is on the rise; and the soon-to-be-leader of the free world conducts diplomacy and policy on the fly via Twitter. This year at Davos, Xi Jinping and Theresa May will rub elbows with Matt Damon and Shakira, but Trudeau isn’t going.

Strange to say it, this state of affairs might make Davos more relevant, not less.”

Hmm… maybe. We’ll see.

Nice piece by Jack Shafer on how the National Inquirer and its ilk pushed the Trump candidacy. I particularly liked this bit:

Some consider Enquirer readers representative of the emerging “post-truth” era, reliant on their own beliefs and indifferent to the facts accepted by the mainstream. But a better way to look at Enquirer readers might be as a “pre-truth” group, drawn to arguments based on pure emotional appeal. Ted Cruz makes such a perfect tabloid villain because he looks like one, because he went to Princeton and Harvard, and because he seems unimpressed by anybody not named Ted Cruz. Hillary Clinton, too, is a paid-in-full member of the American elite: Wellesley, Yale, the Senate and global foundation muckety-muck. Going into 2016, the tabloids already had marked her as their campaign heavy.

Trump, on the other hand, could be cast as the perfect proletarian candidate: patriotic, plain-talking (or plain double-talking) and a nativist. Trump, being rich and educated at the Wharton School, isn’t an obvious ideological fit for these Enquirer readers. But when he wolfs down fast food or speaks in broken sentences, praises his tacky palaces as beautiful, or unexpectedly takes a vulgar turn in the middle of a speech, he ends up declaring a kind of class solidarity with a set of people who could never afford his resorts. His penchant for glitter, big hair, big things in general and bad grammar, and his disdain for all thing refined (his favorite musical is Evita), makes him highly representative of Rust Belt culture. I grew up with many of the people who voted for Trump in the primaries and the general election. They can smell condescension at the parts-per-billion level. With Trump, they don’t even sniffle.

In Cambridge, where I live and work, 74% voted to Remain in the EU, while 26% voted Leave. In Stoke-on-Trent, the respective figures were 31% Remain, 69% Leave. My friends and academic colleagues were astonished by the results from places like Stoke.

I wasn’t — because I know Stoke well. My late wife Sue came from there and my parents-in-law still lived there, so I spent a lot of time in the city and so saw at close hand how it had been devastated by globalisation, automation and central (and local) government neglect.

A few days ago I read Dominic Cummings’s astonishing account of the Brexit campaign, and afterwards started digging back into pre-referendum coverage. In the process I came on this remarkable video made by John Harris in Stoke-on-Trent. From my knowledge of the city, it’s spot on. And Harris is right — the video also illustrates the depth of the problem that the Labour party now faces in UK politics.

UPDATE And no sooner had I posted this than the news broke that Tristram Hunt, the improbable Labour MP for Stoke Central constituency, has been appointed Director of the V&A Museum and so will resign his seat. Which means there will now be a by-election in Stoke.

In psychology, the term magical thinking denotes “the belief that one’s thoughts by themselves can bring about effects in the world or that thinking something corresponds with doing it”. It’s what small children do, often in entrancing ways. But at the moment it’s what the entire ‘liberal’ establishment appears to be engaging in, as its members contemplate the prospect of a Trump presidency. So there’s much chatter along the lines of “well, of course, he’s just the President-elect and doesn’t yet have to operate under the constraints of office”, or “surely he’ll have to give up Tweeting when he’s President”.

For a salutary antidote to this kind of fatuous thinking, see Polly Toynbee’s scarifying piece in today’s Guardian. Way back in 1988 she interviewed — and profiled — Trump. And it’s clear from her report that the monster hasn’t changed one bit. “Trump’s nature”, she writes, “was never a secret”.

He has never dissembled, he can’t dissemble. Why would he when he worships every aspect of himself, each hair on his head, each word he tweets? Greater self-love hath no man.

Apart from his lost good looks, he is unchanged since I interviewed him for the Guardian back in 1988. He was 41 and in Britain to plug his book, The Art of the Deal. Then as now, he was a petrifying megalomaniac with no grip on reality, or not a reality shared by others. At the time I described his “demonic power and energy waiting to spring”. Now look how far he has sprung.

I wrote about his aura of “glitz, greed, glamour and an ambition so colossal that it will probably not rest until he rules the world – which one day he just might”. And next week, God help us, he will. But nearly 30 years ago was his eye already on running for the presidency? I put the question to him. “Not for a period but I am involved politically. You could do it from where I am,” he replied with the same nonchalance he might describe making a pitch for some new property or casino in New York.

She asked him what his platform would be if he ran for President. “Respect”, he replied.

We’re a second-rate economic power, a debtor nation. We’re getting kicked around.” His current determination to tear up Barack Obama’s carefully brokered nuclear deal with Iran has a long history. He told me that as president, “I’d be harsh on Iran. They’ve been beating us psychologically, making us look like a bunch of fools … It’d be good for the world to take them on.”

Sound familiar? That was 29 years ago. Toynbee asked him what he thought about Britain. “Your country’s distaste for success”, he replied, “is a national disease.” Brexiteers, please note. “What kind of trade deal”, asks Toynbee, “does Liam Fox imagine he will broker with this man whose contempt for Britain, even back in its most Trumpish era, was so withering? Just as Trump’s view on Iran is unchanged, I doubt he has formed any new views about Britain”.

And the moral of this little story: if you think the presidency might domesticate Trump, think again. Magical thinking is best left to toddlers.