Congressman drafts COVFEFE Act to preserve Trump's Twitter tantrums A US congressman has written up a bill that calls for the President's social media activity to be archived alongside other official communications. The amusingly titled "Communications Over Various Feeds Electronically for Engagement," or the COVFEFE Act, is the work of Mike Quigley (D-IL), who named the bill in a nod to one …
> Nice one, Mike! Keep going!
Bah. He's as bad as Trump. He took a good idea and chose to frame it as a partisan taunt, wording it in a way that guarantees it can never pass a Republican Congress. That's just a stunt, it's not leadership.
If he was serious, he could and should have written the proposal using neutral language so it actually had a chance to be considered and maybe passed into law. But it so much easier to just bluster and taunt, isn't it? And people apparently love that, as evidenced by all the up-votes on the "nice one" post.
A US congressman has written up a bill that calls for the President's social media activity to be archived alongside other official communications.
It's a useless bill. By law, all the President's communications are logged and archived anyway. Even his location, the Pres wears a GPS tracker so his location is logged all the time.
By law the President's communications are logged and archived. Not his personal Twitter account, which Trump is using in preference to the 'official' @POTUS Twitter handle.
Still, it doesn't matter, because even if he deletes tweets from his personal Twitter, there are bots following it that see and archive everything - plus have archived all his past tweets so he hasn't been able to get away with deleting tweets from a few years ago that contradict more recent statements.
By law the President's communications are logged and archived. Not his personal Twitter account,
Once sworn in, the President basically surrenders a personal life. He wears the "Lojack", there is no debate. The Secret Service makes certain decisions on the Prez's activities that the Prez may not dispute. All emails, phone calls, electronic conversations are monitored regardless of personal or not, because there is no "personal". Even his body waste is collected and destroyed when traveling, because a bad actor could analyze it and determine weaknesses in the Prez's health.
I don't know about the rest of you, but I don't think I could stand being monitored 24 hours a day for four or eight years like this.
Bluster and taunt? Nah - effective use of available media. Given that the Republican's would kick any such bill in to the long grass (you really think the Reps would let this one through in any form?), at least by being an amusing taunt to the world's most thin-skinned politician, this gets maximum publicity for the entertainment value, and forever more will pop up any time someone tries to find out what covfefe really means.
And how dare anyone upvote a post they like or find amusing - the raw cheek of it!
DagD I agree with you 100%. It is imperative that to understand President Trump one has to realize that any or all of his public statements may be highly exaggerated, campaign-rhetorical, gloriously literary, greatly imaginative, or factually nonbased. No one should take any of his statements seriously (as an indication of a policy direction *of course*) and only a fool democrat would suggest something as silly as actually preserving the words of a The Best President literally. The only thing we need to remember about the Great President is MAGA and he never said anything otherwise.
"It is imperative that to understand President Trump one has to realize that any or all of his public statements may be highly exaggerated, campaign-rhetorical, gloriously literary, greatly imaginative, or factually nonbased"
In other words, President Trump == Zaphod Beeblebrox.
I have long suspected that the man is merely a figurehead, distracting attention away from a real governing power - in much the same way as Douglas Adams portrayed.
Yes, these should be preserved. If he is using a personal twitter account in his capacity as an elected official, then the content is "official presidential communication".
It would be different if he primarily used the potus account for twitting policy, agenda, and propaganda, and used his personal account only for personal business e.g. "Stay at the Trump Hotel! For every 100 nights, you get a meeting with the Best President Ever (except for maybe FDR)"
Putting partisanship aside (something that Congressman Quigley should have done if he really wanted this proposal to be taken seriously), it's a good idea. I can imagine the knee-jerk responses -- Republicans trying to shoot this down because it targets Trump, Democrats trying to keep it going in order to annoy Trump -- but if the shoe were on the other foot -- if a Democratic president had taken to Twitter like Trump has -- you can imagine that the roles would be exactly reversed.
Many people do take Trump's tweets seriously, they're unquestionably a crucial element of the current political discourse in the U.S. Whether you agree with them or not, officially archiving them is the right thing to do.
The books of the Yes Minister scripts are presented as if they were academic historical research based on cassettes dictated by Hacker late at night post-whisky. The introduction says that the inconsistencies "have been preserved as they allow us insight into the mind of this great political leader" or words to the same effect. Although Yes Minister was entertainment (or maybe we should class it as infotainment) it seems that fact has ambushed fiction and a similar argument could be made for preserving the Trumpetings.
Agree. Though I was a bit surprised at first, assuming that it was a Rep initiative and thinking they'd want his "pearls of wisdom" swept under the carpet pronto.
Being a Dem's idea makes more sense and too bad he's just having a laugh because, for better or worse, this is emerging as a policy comm channel.
Btw, whatever happened to Big John? No one around to praise the Orange One anymore. Eadon'd out?
@PDH
The same thing happened with campaign finance. The democrats pushed the bill identifying corporations as people so they could get huge corporate donations. Well, they got it and celebrated. But when the pendulum swung the other way, suddenly it was outrage.
Regarding the COVFEFE act. Surely we have more important things that our 'representatives' should be spending their time on?
@John: yes, sadly this kind of thing happens all the time. I lean toward the right myself, but I remember back in the fall of 2001, after 9/11, telling my like-minded friends that we would surely come to regret the Patriot Act and all its trimmings, as soon as some left-wing liberal became president and took control of the machinery. And sure enough...
"Will this still sound like a good idea when the roles are reversed and the other side takes power?" I wish more people considered that when making legislative proposals...
With the handle "zx122982685" you might as well have an "Egg" as your icon.
@DrewC, May I respectfully suggest the forum mods get the ability to block the "[Comment] Withdrawal" option on absurd posts like that from "zx122982685"? Your response cheered me up and it would be a shame to lose the context.
actually makes sense from an accountability standpoint, if nothing else.
What's that noise?
Oh ... um ...
Which is exactly why this absolutely cannot be allowed! That is not the American way! Plausible deniability and golden parachutes for the One Percent! Logging Trump's public tweets would be a breach of National Security! And a violation of privacy! And technically impractical! And ...
Oh. Phew. It's gone now.
I think I'd leave this one to the private sector, which seems to have it pretty much covered.
On the other hand, assuming that what he tweets is in the public domain, why not start a business selling fortune cookies with Trump's greatest hits printed on the little slips inside? There ought to be a market for that among the young, hip, and (at least would-be) ironic.
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