After Twitter wags archly suggested that Donald Trump might want to move this year’s Republican National Convention from Charlotte, Noth Carolina to his own Doral resort in Miami — after the president tweeted a warning to that state’s Democratic governor earlier this morning threatening to cancel the event if the state didn’t start to relax its pandemic restrictions — Trump took the satirical commentary seriously and issued a sharp denial of any such plans in his social media feed.
I have zero interest in moving the Republican National Convention to Doral in Miami, as falsely reported by the Fake News @nytimes in order to stir up trouble. Ballroom is not nearly big enough & would like to stay in N.C., whose gov. doesn’t even know if he can let people in? https://t.co/nqBBPv4VXS
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) May 25, 2020
As someone who seems to get the majority of his information from right-wing news outlets and unverified conspiracy theorists on Twitter, Trump, of course, didn’t bother to verify whether the media was actually reporting what “April” said it had reported, as Maggie Haberman of The New York Times soon reminded the president.
Actually no one reported that, sir. As always appreciate you checking to see what was what before you tweeted. https://t.co/Q6z64qBIJj
— Maggie Haberman (@maggieNYT) May 25, 2020
Who’s the one stirring up trouble here? It doesn’t appear to be The New York Times.
As much as many may relish the thought of “many thousands of enthusiastic Republicans” gathered together in close quarters at their convention in the midst of a pandemic, the collateral damage that such a super-spreader event would cause has cooler heads realizing that only Donald Trump could be promoting such a spectacularly deadly idea.
Trump’s insistence on conducting the Republican Convention with all its traditional trappings in conventional form as a mass gathering reveals not just his magical thinking that the virus will somehow miraculously disappear — a notion that defies all available scientific evidence — only serves to confirm the fact that his earlier tweets were indeed a form of political extortion against a Democratic governor who is merely trying to safeguard the people of his state and follow the guidelines published by scientific and medical experts, including Trump’s own Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Trump has already made it plainly obvious that he cares not a whit about the health and safety of Americans, even his most rabid — and potentially contagious — supporters.
His extortionate demands to North Carolina’s Democratic governor drives his indifference home even further.
His failure to check his sources before tweeting a denial of a rumor that was a mere joke on social media shows that he would be as tremendous a failure as a journalist as he is as president.
Follow Vinnie Longobardo on Twitter.
We want to hear what YOU have to say. Scroll down and let us know in our NEW comment section!