Warped

I suspect Donald Trump's current noisy battle with Twitter over what he falsely claims is censorship is an attempt to deflect attention from his ongoing and disastrous mismanagement of the coronavirus crisis.

And I also suspect Trump is using this non-issue to rile up his base about something that's entirely irrelevant to the 2020 presidential election.

These two considerations aside, Trump is wailing about what he claims is censorship of him while at the same pushing measures that would allow him to censor and silence his critics. Adam Serwer at The Atlantic published a smart piece yesterday (link here) explaining how he wants to do this.

"To the President, criticism of his falsehoods is a violation of his free-speech rights," he writes. "This position reverses the purpose of the First Amendment, turning an individual right of freedom of expression into the right of the state to silence its critics."

Fortunately, federal judges, even conservative ones, are loathe to uphold limitations on free speech. So his actions will probably not pass constitutional muster when they're litigated. But Trump likely doesn't really care about that — he's milking this now for political reasons.

Nonetheless, the whole thing underscores how little respect Trump has for the Constitution and for free speech. In his wannabe dictator brain, it's perfectly all right for a head of state to censor his critics. His buddies Putin and the rest of his authoritarian bros can do it, and he wants to do that, too.

All the more reason the man must be removed from office by defeating him in November. His values and goals are the antithesis of what this nation is all about. It's time he was gone.