Journalist

President Trump, stop blocking me on Twitter / CNN

When Donald Trump first started tweeting as president, my eyes were popping out of my head at each weird, angry and (we learned later) apparently unvetted proclamation. I couldn’t believe he was making such statements on Twitter, as opposed to in an official White House statement, which we, the press, rely on for responses to world issues.

The problem with the President’s tweets, besides their mangled syntax, made-up words and personal vendettas, is that so many of them are flat-out lies: narratives cooked up from who knows where in his mind and disseminated to his millions of followers (and millions of bots).
So when he tweeted on Sunday after the terror attack in London: “At least 7 dead and 48 wounded in terror attack and Mayor of London says there is ‘no reason to be alarmed!'” like many I was appalled but not surprised. The quote from London Mayor Sadiq Khan was, of course, taken entirely out of context and as such amounted to a lie.
I replied to Trump on Twitter: “What Khan in fact said: There was ‘no reason to be alarmed’ by an increased, armed police presence. You know no bounds. Liar.”
And he blocked me.
(To read the rest of this op-ed, please click over to CNN.)

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