Please, Jack, Pull the Plug on Trump

Maureen Dowd wants Twitter CEO to take away the president's 140-character bully pulpit
By Polly Davis Doig,  Newser Staff
Posted May 31, 2020 8:07 AM CDT
Maureen Dowd: Please, Jack, Pull the Plug on Trump
In this June 7, 2019, file photo, Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey leaves after his talk with French President Emmanuel Macron at the Elysee Palace in Paris.   (AP Photo/Francois Mori, File)

Calling the president of the United States and Twitter "a match made in hell," Maureen Dowd is calling for Jack Dorsey to "pull the plug on" President Trump's account. "You could answer the existential question of whether @realDonaldTrump even exists if he doesn’t exist on Twitter," she writes in the New York Times. "I tweet, therefore I am. Dorsey meets Descartes." The president "constantly torques up the tribal friction and cruelty" online and Dowd has given up on Mark Zuckerberg at Facebook ever trying to rein it in, so she's banking on the Twitter chief making "one sweet click to force the greatest troll in the history of the internet to meet his maker."

Dorsey already tried slapped controls on false Trump tweets, attracting the president's ire and prompting him to strip social media sites of liability protection. Good luck with that, writes Dowd. The president wants to say things on Twitter that he will not be allowed to say if he exerts this control over Twitter. In a sense, it’s Trump versus his own brain. If Twitter can be sued for what people say on it, how can Trump continue to torment? Wouldn’t thousands of his own tweets have to be deleted? "C’mon, Jack. Make @realDonaldTrump melt to help end our meltdown." Read her full column. (More Twitter stories.)

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