Trump Declared Twitter Should Be Shut Down

“If it were legal, if it were able to be legally shut down, I would do it.”

That’s the president of the United States yesterday, describing, I think honestly, what he’d like to do to an American company that no one — no one — is alleging to have broken a single law. Their transgression is that they simply displease him. It’s worth watching him say it on video, just to absorb how casual he is about something so profound.

It has been the historical norm for all presidents, Republican and Democrat alike, to speak of the U.S. Constitution with reverence, as a set of righteous ideals that guide our nation, a codification of our collective sense of what is right and just — not as a set of constraints that shackle the president from doing what he’d really like to do.

★ Friday, 29 May 2020