His Presidents' Day tweets showed why Trump is unfit to be president - By Max Boot
By Max Boot
Columnist
February 19 at 1:51 PM
Presidents’ Day weekend is traditionally a time for relaxation — and perhaps a little contemplation of two of our greatest presidents, Abraham Lincoln and George Washington. In President Trump’s case, it was an opportunity to play golf in Florida and to tweet up a storm. He published 40 tweets from Saturday morning to Monday night. Taken together, they tell a story of just how “unpresidented” his behavior remains as he enters his third year in office.
Simply the fact that he sent so many tweets, and they were so personal and vituperative, is an anomaly. Twitter was founded only in 2006 and President George W. Bush never used it while in office. The first presidential tweet was sent by President Barack Obama in 2010 — an innocuous message to promote disaster aid for Haiti. Trump is the first president to unburden his id on Twitter in a way that Richard M. Nixon did only on the White House tapes.
By Trump’s standards, his first tweet of the weekend — at 11:43 a.m. on Saturday — was tame: It was a video clip of his declaration of a state of emergency on Friday. His second one was a little weirder: a clip from his State of the Union address with Lee Greenwood’s “God Bless the U.S.A.” blasting in the background. At 7:10 p.m. on Saturday, Trump for some reason felt compelled to write “BUILDING THE WALL!” — his first lie of the weekend, since the border wall is not being built. Lie No. 2 followed just seven minutes later when he tweeted: “Billions of Dollars are being paid to the United States by China in the form of Trade Tariffs!” As a first-year economics student would know, tariffs are paid by domestic consumers, not by foreign governments.
Things started to get really weird late on Saturday night. At 10:51 p.m., Trump tweeted a demand that “Britain, France, Germany and other European allies” take back 800 Islamic State fighters captured in Syria. He warned: “The alternative is not a good one in that we will be forced to release them........ The U.S. does not want to watch as these ISIS fighters permeate Europe, which is where they are expected to go.” This is the president as mob enforcer: Nice country you have there; it’d be a shame if we had to release some terrorists there!
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https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2019/02/19/his-presidents-day-tweets-showed-why-trump-is-unfit-be-president/