I say YES. YOU say NO....Numero Tre! Enjoy!
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I would love this to be true, but honestly -- I have no idea. Sure sounds good though.
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YouTube extends Trump suspension, slaps new restrictions on Giuliani
YouTube has extended its suspension of former President Donald Trump's channel indefinitely.
01/26/2021 06:48 PM EST
https://www.politico.com/amp/news/2021/01/26/youtube-donald-trump-suspension-rudy-giuliani-462878
YouTube initially said it was giving Trump his first of three strikes before it would permanently ban him from the site under its content policies, suspending him for a minimum of one week. It extended that suspension last Tuesday for at least another week. But the company offered no timetable for the latest extension, making his suspension effectively indefinite.
"In light of concerns about the ongoing potential for violence, the Donald J. Trump channel will remain suspended," YouTube spokesperson Ivy Choi said in a statement. "Our teams are staying vigilant and closely monitoring for any new developments."
YouTube separately said it will temporarily bar Giuliani from participating in a program that allows him to make money off his channel due to repeated violations of its policies against making false claims about widespread voter fraud in the 2020 elections, according to a spokesperson. Giuliani can reapply for the program after 30 days if the issues with his account have been resolved, the spokesperson said.
The impact: Trump has now been permanently booted off Twitter, his signature platform, and faces indefinite suspensions from both Facebook and YouTube, cutting him off from three of the most potent means for communication online.
The action against Giuliani temporarily cuts off a prominent revenue stream for the former president's personal lawyer
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You gotta love it. And it comes as no surprise:
Polls find Biden's approval rating higher than Trump's ever was
January 26, 2021, 2:41 pm
President Biden's approval rating in his first days in office is higher than Donald Trump ever achieved during his four years as president, two new polls have found.
A Morning Consult tracking poll published Monday found that 56 percent of voters approve of Biden's job performance, while 34 percent disapprove. At the same early juncture of Trump's presidency, 46 percent of Americans polled said they approved of his job performance, and the polling high point for his term in office came in March 2017, when his approval rating hit 52 percent.
A second poll, conducted by Hill-HarrisX and also released on Monday, put Biden's approval rating at 63 percent, while 37 percent said they disapprove of the job he was doing so far. Trump, by contrast, reached an approval rating high of 52 percent in an April 2020 survey by the same pollster.
The kickoff to Biden's presidential term has been marked by a series of executive orders that have aimed to either correct or overturn policies put in place by executive orders signed by Trump, including rejoining the Paris climate accord, rescinding a ban on transgender troops from serving in the U.S. military and lifting a ban on travel to the U.S. from several Muslim and African countries.
In part, the swift reversal of controversial Trump policies has solidified Biden's standing with his party. The Morning Consult poll found that 91 percent of Democrats approve of Biden's job performance, compared with just 4 percent of Democrats who disapprove and 5 percent who said they have no opinion. At this same juncture in Trump's presidency, 83 percent of Republicans said they approved of his job performance.
Further reading: https://news.yahoo.com/amphtml/polls-find-bidens-approval-rating-higher-than-trumps-ever-was-194133765.html
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Biden oath second only to Reagan and Obama with TV viewers
NEW YORK (AP) — The first inaugurations of Presidents Ronald Reagan and Barack Obama were the only ones to exceed Joe Biden's in popularity among television viewers over the past 40 years.
The Nielsen company said that 33.8 million people watched Biden's inauguration over 17 television networks between 10 a.m. and 4 p.m. last Wednesday.
Reagan's festivities in 1981 drew 41.8 million viewers, and Obama's 2009 inaugural reached 37.8 million, Nielsen said.
Perhaps most important to a former president known to watch television ratings closely: Biden exceeded the 30.6 million who watched Donald Trump take office in 2017, Nielsen said.
CNN was the most popular network for inaugural viewers, Nielsen said. Meanwhile, Fox News' audience for Biden's oath of office and inaugural address was down 77% from the network's viewership for Trump.
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Apparently true.Saw a news clip where reporter yelled ? Biden yelled back You! He sends his best.
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@ Jackie, I saw the press conference and wondered what question and reporter President Biden responded to. I thought the President answered in a fun manner. Maybe he was serious???
@ Sandy, How far away is your vaccine? Your packing sounds like when GD had softball tournaments in JR High, I I had toilet paper, seat covers, paper towels blanket, sunscreen, walkie-talkies, water, fruit and snacks. Also a tent and table. Just for the day.
@Ruth, may I add my name to your Zoom?
Loving all of you!!!!!!!!!! k2k0 -
Do you all want me to set up a Practice Zoom on Saturday? Instead of PM a bunch of people, I could just post the link in the thread and you could show up if it works for you. Since the thread is 'hidden' we'd be the only ones to see it.
Illinois, if you want to try it ahead of time, PM me and I'll set up a practice/practice session for us.
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Sounds like a plan, Ruth!
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Norridge is 12 miles away, but during a snowstorm it feels a lot further! (Ironically, there's a Walgreen's around the corner from me, but they aren't vaccinating). Had the first shot (Moderna) this morning, and got an impressive injection site reaction--arm is hella stiff & sore. Bob didn't even have any redness from his first Pfizer shot. My second shot is set for 2/24, same Walgreen's. I plan to clear my calendar for a couple of days thereafter, because I expect it'll hit me like a Mack truck.
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Inside the Biden plan to be boring
By SAM STEIN - Politico
01/26/2021NEVER TWEET — If President Joe Biden's first week in office has given off the scent of a highly scripted affair, that's because it was one. His team has been crafting each day around themes. Today's was racial equality, with the president issuing executive orders to, among other things, transition the federal government away from the use of private prisons.
Tomorrow will be about climate change. Later in the week will come an offering on immigration. Each day will involve a slate of unilateral actions, a background briefing with reporters and a press appearance by a top aide, or, perhaps, the head honcho himself.
All of this is known because there is a memo circulating around Washington newsrooms that lays out a semi-detailed schedule for Biden's executive action blitz. No publication has printed it because it reads as incomplete and partially inaccurate: a number of the actions listed on it have already come on different days. But several sources close to the White House confirmed that the document — even though clearly a draft — was authentic.
In total, the memo outlines an ambitious attempt at effecting social change from the Oval Office. But it also shows a White House making a gamble of sorts: that it can apply traditional communication methods to a nontraditional media climate.
Biden could theoretically have released all the executive orders and actions on his first day in office or over a more compressed window. Instead, his team chose to dribble them out over the course of more than a dozen days, with most of those days having separate themes. There is Covid, Economic Relief, Buy America, Equity, Climate, Health Care, Immigration and "Restoring America's Place in the World" (a project the memo reserves for February).
The reason for moving slowly and thematically is simple: They want to program the news coverage of their opening weeks in office.
This is standard operating procedure for any White House. At least, it was for all of the ones in memory other than Donald Trump's. And that's precisely what makes this strategy a rather complex one for Biden's team. They're coming in right after the most impulsive, id-driven president in history.
Even when it was operating at its most cohesive and organized level, Trump's White House didn't program its days. It couldn't. His Twitter feed did, announcing abrupt firings, new policy initiatives, political fights and media quarrels that completely disrupted any carefully laid plans his team had tried to put together.
In turn, the White House press corps became intoxicated — and, perhaps, overdosed a few times — on his quick-change programming.
The challenge facing Biden's comms team over the next four years is figuring out not just how to detox the press, but also whether they even can, and whether that actually matters.
To some degree, they are already seeing the perils of the hyper-kinetic national media climate that Trump exploited more than created. Biden allies privately bristle at stories on the president's Rolex watch and Peloton, as well as what they see as bad-faith coverage over whether he's instantly achieving his calls for unity.
But their larger conviction is, as Biden's 2020 candidacy seemingly proved, that these Twittering-class stories are gnats that should best be ignored. And so they're sticking to an orchestrated plan of thematic days based around executive orders — an approach that seems positively quaint now, but one that veterans say will do them much good.
"Not all news stories are good news stories, and a lot of stories for Trump were dumpster fires," is how David Axelrod, Barack Obama's former top comms hand, explained it to me. "What you want to do is just convey a constant sense of action and competence, especially on those things plaguing the country."
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Strength is a capacity for endurance. One of the dividends of suffering is the universal discovery the we possess a strength within us we never knew we had. Navigating through a difficult episode not only shows us that inner strength is there but convinces us it will always be there to serve us in the future. Overcoming gives us an assurance of personal confidence and value that far exceeds what we thought we possessed before our struggles began.
Dennis Wholey0 -
I definitely could use a practice run Ruth. I think ( hope ) that will get me hatted in a less stressful way. At least I will know beforehand what to expect. Let me know when and where and I'll do my utmost to work it out. Saturdays are usually ok for me. I go out and feed the feral cats, but that is generally a brief interlude in what is normally a quiet day. Most evenings I'm home.
I'm happy with the 'boring' Biden plan. Then again, I was sooo anxious to be done/rid of the Orange thing. It is a comfort to be done with the STRESS level produced basically 24/7. I'm not surprised so many people fell away from even posting for such a long time -- go happy to see K2K, Trill and others who only cam on occasion. I stayed fighting the whole time, but I felt people were feeling so minimized and I didn't want them too. I don't know if it helped or hindered or did nothing -- but it did something for me. So, I'm hopeful that for at least two yrs. but hopefully more, Biden will be able to re-set a lot of how government works for people -- and it WILL be the people who most were able to bring him over the finish line.
I pray every day that the Reps. are as 'wrecked' as they seem to be and will get more so. I honestly don't think Trump will end up a huge factor. NY is NOT on his side, but I am concerned about those who are going to do their utmost to remain Trumpers. I hope we in time can change that. Little did we know how many are out there who would like to do us in, but they hopefully will always be a minority. Important then to get as many as we can and put them where they belong. IN jail.
Yes, Spookie. So many do not want Trump's name associated with their own. If you want to sell your property or even sublet or whatever, it would likely be easier if Trump's name is nowhere around. Also, I think with SDNY and banks and people who may wish to call in loans, the name is only going to tarnish more. I hope the guy ends up penniless which he darn well should -- and his kids have to figure out how to get real jobs and actually work. They may never know WORK like many of the rest of us -- but even at that I'd like to feel they have to worry as much as many of us have as to just how they are going to make a go of things.
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Illinois, I sent you a PM.
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Biden Team Rushes to Take Over Government, and Oust Trump Loyalists
President Biden named nearly all of his cabinet secretaries and their immediate deputies before he took office, but his real grasp on the levers of power has come several layers down.
Jan. 27, 2021, 10:31 a.m. ET
President Biden held a virtual swearing-in ceremony for White House aides and appointees on Inauguration Day.Doug Mills/The New York Times
WASHINGTON — When President Biden swore in a batch of recruits for his new administration in a teleconferenced ceremony late last week, it looked like the country's biggest Zoom call. In fact, Mr. Biden was installing roughly 1,000 high-level officials in about a quarter of all of the available political appointee jobs in the federal government.
At the same time, a far less visible transition was taking place: the quiet dismissal of holdovers from the Trump administration, who have been asked to clean out their offices immediately, whatever the eventual legal consequences.
If there has been a single defining feature of the first week of the Biden administration, it has been the blistering pace at which the new president has put his mark on what President Donald J. Trump dismissed as the hostile "Deep State" and tried so hard to dismantle.
From the Pentagon, where 20 senior officials were ready to move in days before the Senate confirmed Lloyd J. Austin III as defense secretary, to the Voice of America, where the Trump-appointed leadership was replaced hours after the inauguration, the Biden team arrived in Washington not only with plans for each department and agency, but the spreadsheets detailing who would carry them out.
A replacement was even in the works for the president's doctor: Dr. Sean P. Conley, who admitted to providing a rosy, no-big-deal description of Mr. Trump's Covid-19 symptoms last year, was told to pack his medical kit. While all presidents eventually bring in their own doctor, Mr. Biden wasted no time bringing back a retired Army colonel, Dr. Kevin O'Connor, who was his doctor when he was vice president.
Mr. Biden had named nearly all of his cabinet secretaries and their immediate deputies before he took office last Wednesday, most of them familiar faces from the Obama administration. But the president's real grasp on the levers of power has come several layers down.
The National Security Council, for example, where American foreign policy comes together, already has staff members in place for jobs that sometimes take months to fill. There is an Asia czar (Kurt M. Campbell, who served in President Barack Obama's State Department), a China director and directors for other regions. There is a full homeland security staff and a new, expanded White House operation to oversee cyberoffense and defense.
The contrast with the Trump administration at a similar point in time is striking. Mr. Trump had no experience in government — which he made a selling point in his 2016 campaign — and mistrusted those who did. He made it clear that he planned to shrink or starve some agencies, often before determining how to align their missions with the right number of personnel.
Many of Mr. Trump's appointees — except at the Defense Department and at the Department of Veterans Affairs — arrived with instructions to cut, and it became a point of pride among Trump administration officials to leave jobs open. In the end, Mr. Trump did not shrink the federal work force by much — except in places like the Education Department — but his determination to do so meant that many posts went unfilled for the first two years.
No place was that mission clearer than at the State Department, which Mr. Trump delighted in calling the "Deep State Department." The first secretary to arrive, Rex W. Tillerson, recalled last year that he spent months examining what he called the "lines of authority" inside the building, and creating strategies to cut the department's staff by 30 percent — time that might have been spent thinking about ways to develop policy toward China or Russia, or anywhere else. Congress blocked most of the cuts.
Today, the State Department is being run by Foreign Service officers and career officials — the core of the Deep State in the view of Mr. Trump's allies — who greeted the new secretary of state, Antony J. Blinken, when he arrived for his first full day of work on Wednesday after being confirmed by the Senate. Mr. Blinken grew up inside the department — he joined in 1993 — and served at the end of the Obama administration as its deputy secretary.
So far, there have been few appointments at State: Foreign and Civil Service officers have filled in. But Mr. Blinken plans to make some of those appointments permanent, going back to a previous era when career officials, or retired foreign service officers, take posts that in more recent times have been filled with political appointees.
At the National Security Council, the White House said in a statement, Mr. Biden has "nearly doubled the number of staff ready to start and onboarded than either Trump did in 2017 or Obama in 2009." The White House offered no specific numbers, but said they reflected "the urgent need to build — in some cases rebuild — capabilities like climate, cyber, global health security and biodefense, and democracy from the ground up."
The new staff members will have their work cut out for them.
"In making appointments as a new president, Biden has a much tougher job than Trump," said Michael Beschloss, the presidential historian, who has written about many transitions. "It's harder to rebuild a government than it is to ransack, demoralize and hollow a government out."
But there has also been a lot of rooting out.
The tone was set before Mr. Biden was sworn in. On the Saturday evening before the inauguration, Michael Ellis, a Trump loyalist, was installed as general counsel of the National Security Agency on the orders of Mr. Trump's acting defense secretary. It was a classic case of "burrowing" a political appointee into the bureaucracy in a new, nonpolitical job classification that would make it hard to fire him.
But after Mr. Biden became president, Mr. Ellis was immediately placed on administrative leave while the National Security Agency's inspector general examined the circumstances of how he was chosen. Now it is unclear if Mr. Ellis will ever serve in the job.
The Trump administration made a similar attempt to burrow officials into the United States Agency for Global Media, which broadcasts around the world, with similar results.
Some officials were fired outright. The Biden team told Victoria Coates, a former Trump national security official who was made the head of the government's Middle East Broadcasting Networks in the last days of the administration, that it did not care that her contract called for her to serve at least two years and that she could not be removed unless she was convicted of a felony. Her email was cut off at the end of last week in what she called "a shocking repudiation of President Biden's call for unity and reconciliation."
In every department, there is already a Biden team on the ground, including those like the hollowed-out Housing and Urban Development, which was run for the past four years by a disengaged secretary, Ben Carson, and a group of ideologically oriented appointees.
The first and most critical pick by the Biden team for the department was Jenn Jones, a top policy adviser to Julián Castro, Mr. Obama's last HUD secretary.
Ms. Jones was placed in the role of chief of staff — in many way acting as the de facto head of the agency pending the confirmation of Mr. Biden's nominee, for secretary, Marcia L. Fudge. The policy team has already hired Richard Cho, an executive with a New England coalition that tackles homelessness, and Peggy Bailey, the head of housing for the progressive Center on Budget and Policy Priorities.
At the Department of Health and Human Services, largely ignored by Mr. Trump, at least 18 new political appointees have taken up position, still a fraction of a department that is typically run by over 100.
But one or two well-placed allies can mean a decisive change of direction. One key appointment is Dr. Benjamin Sommers, a Harvard health economist and an alumnus of the department. He took a top role in the agency's research office, which had been hijacked under Mr. Trump by political appointees who warped reports, web pages and planning documents, rooting out flattering references to the Affordable Care Act and inserting anti-abortion language.
There are departments that were largely ignored by President Donald J. Trump, like the Department of Health and Human Services.Then there is the Department of Homeland Security, where the nomination of Mr. Biden's pick to lead the agency, Alejandro N. Mayorkas, has been stalled by political fallout from the president's attempts to roll back Mr. Trump's immigration restrictions.
The Biden administration has swiftly moved political appointees deep into the department's bureaucracy. In an example of Mr. Biden's pivot from Mr. Trump's aggressive immigration measures, Timothy Perry, a former official with the California Governor's Office of Emergency Services, will replace Kathy Nuebel Kovarik, a former staff member for Senator Charles E. Grassley, as chief of staff of Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
Ashley Tabaddor, a constant critic of the Trump administration as the former head of the union that represents immigration judges, will take over as chief counsel at U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, the federal legal immigration agency.
At the Justice Department — where morale was largely decimated and Biden administration officials are eager to begin reversing Trump policies on civil rights, immigration and police oversight — all of the department's top incoming acting department heads are alumni, some of whom worked under multiple administrations.
Until Judge Merrick B. Garland is confirmed as attorney general, Monty Wilkinson, a longtime career employee who worked closely with Eric H. Holder Jr. when he was attorney general, is serving in an acting capacity.
The acting deputy attorney general is John P. Carlin, who ran the national security division of the Justice Department during the Obama administration. He is holding the office only until Lisa Monaco, who has worked closely with Mr. Carlin over the years, can be confirmed as deputy attorney general. She served as homeland security adviser under Mr. Obama and, during the Trump years, she and Mr. Carlin ran a group studying the hardest issues in cyberpolicy.
Much as the politicization of the Justice Department angered Mr. Trump's critics, the neutering of the Environmental Protection Agency prompted outrage from progressives, and it is probably no surprise that the agency is already in the throes of transformation.
About a month before Inauguration Day, a Trump official who ran the water office, Charlotte Bertrand, suddenly emerged as the woman who would take over as acting administrator if the head of the agency resigned. When that moment came, she never had a chance to settle into the chair.
Just hours into his presidency, Mr. Biden named Jane Nishida, the agency's principal deputy assistant head of the Office of International and Tribal Affairs, to lead the agency until his nominee, Michael S. Regan, North Carolina's top environmental regulator, is confirmed.
But long before Mr. Regan gets to the building, a cadre of young staff members — a roster that reads like a who's who of climate change policy wonks, many of them culled from the Obama administration — will be at work.
Tiernan Sittenfeld, the senior vice president for government affairs at the League of Conservation Voters, said the team of seasoned staff members was chosen specifically to make quick work of reversing Mr. Trump's policies.
"It was clear that we were coming off of the most anti-environmental, anti-climate action administration we've ever had," Ms. Sittenfeld said. She added: "The need to act immediately was going to be so vitally important. There was a very intentional, very thoughtful, ambitious effort to get highly skilled experts in place right away."
Reporting was contributed by Lisa Friedman, Noah Weiland, Glenn Thrush,Helene Cooper, Coral Davenport, Katie Benner, and Zolan Kanno-Youngs
David E. Sanger is a national security correspondent.
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Divine: The above is a comfort piece if ever I saw one. We not only needed a highly stable President, but also highly competent people who could re-align, restore and fruitfully fill depts. decimated and nearly destroyed by the orange thing. It just feels comfortable to think about items put back into place that actually cater to the health and welfare of the citizens who pay taxes and have a right to expect certain things. While some businesses will likely feel some small sufferings, I think even some of them actually wanted regulations that were "healthier". They do know you can bend way too far in one direction -- and someone pays for that and it may be you and yours.
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There really is no bottom for some.
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Okay, I have set up a Zoom meeting for Saturday. Note that it is scheduled for 11:30 am CENTRAL TIME. Adjust the time according to your time zone. (I figured with 11:30 Central time, it shouldn't be too early or too late for anyone.) You should be able to get into the meeting by just clicking on the link. If not, the Meeting ID & Passcode are also listed. (I have a free account, so we will have a 40 minute time limit.) Check it out if you can. It should be fun, and I will bring feedback to BCO on whether Zoom Meetings are something they may want to facilitate.
Zoom Meeting
Topic: I Say Yes
Time: Jan 30, 2021 11:30 AM Central Time (US and Canada)Join Zoom Meeting
https://us04web.zoom.us/j/79784049913?pwd=Qm5CaXRSMURXUHV2d1FadVNMZEFldz09Meeting ID: 797 8404 9913
Passcode: kUimcB0 -
Sandy: The Moderna dose is twice the volume of the Pfizer and the max volume to go in the deltoid. I had heard about the sore arm (and of course one arm is off limits and I sleep on the other one!) so I got mine in my behind. Seriously didn't feel a thing!
Of course, even the Moderna is a tiny volume -- just 1/2 cc.
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This is pretty cool! Amanda Gorman is going to be reading a poem she wrote honoring First Responders at the Super Bowl.
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I know the NFL is giving thousands of free tickets to first responders (who have been already vaccinated) so that is cool too.
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YesIamaDrag- I got my first Moderna yesterday and boy I wish I could have gotten in my butt. My arm is killing me. I also have a headache, feel flu-ish and have congestion. They say if you had coronavirus then you might have an adverse effect from the first shot. But at least I got it.
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Bernie Sanders raises $1.8 million for charity with inauguration meme-inspired merchandise
(CNN) — Sen. Bernie Sanders has raised $1.8 million for charity through the sale of merchandise inspired by the viral photo of him and his mittens on Inauguration Day.
The Vermont senator's team began selling sweatshirts and T-shirts featuring the photo, which inspired countless memes, on his campaign store last Thursday.
The $45 black crewneck sweatshirt seems to be as popular as the meme -- the first run of the product sold out in under 30 minutes on Thursday night, according to a news release from Sanders' office.
"More items were added over the weekend, and sold out by Monday morning," the news release said.
"Jane and I were amazed by all the creativity shown by so many people over the last week, and we're glad we can use my internet fame to help Vermonters in need," Sanders said in the statement.
"But even this amount of money is no substitute for action by Congress, and I will be doing everything I can in Washington to make sure working people in Vermont and across the country get the relief they need in the middle of the worst crisis we've faced since the Great Depression."
The charities Sanders picked to benefit from the merchandise sales include: Area Agencies on Aging to fund Meals on Wheels throughout Vermont, Vermont Community Action Agencies, Feeding Chittenden, Vermont Parent Child Network, The Chill Foundation, Senior Centers in Vermont through the Area Agencies and Bistate Primary Care for dental care improvements in Vermont.
Age Well, the largest provider of Meals on Wheels in Vermont, said on Twitter that it is "BLOWN AWAY by the support for our Meals on Wheels program" from the sweatshirt sales.
"On behalf of all of the area agencies on aging and our partners in the community who help us provide meal services, this is a tremendous gift and we couldn't be more grateful," Age Well CEO Jane Catton told CNN affiliate WCAX.
Sanders isn't the only one using the viral moment as a chance to raise money for charities.
As part of the licensing agreement to put the famous photo on T-shirts, sweatshirts and stickers, Getty Images will donate its proceeds from the license to Meals on Wheels America, according to the news release.
Burton Snowboards, which makes the coat Sanders wore on Inauguration Day, donated 50 jackets to the Burlington Department for Children and Families in the senator's name.
A crocheted Bernie Sanders doll raised more than $40k for charity in an online auction
Inspired by Sanders' donations, a Texas woman, Tobey King, auctioned off a handmade crochet doll of Sanders and raised over $40,000 for Meals of Wheels America.
"Senator Sanders has long been one of Meals on Wheels' biggest advocates," Jenny Young, vice president of communications for Meals on Wheels America, told CNN before the auction ended, "and it's incredible to see how his unexpected moment in the spotlight is inspiring others to join the fight to address senior hunger and isolation, as well
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cHell, it was a priceless gift to us all!****************************************
The greatest gift Biden ever received was Trump getting booted off Twitter
"Not having to deal with a deranged new tweet every hour? They feel blessed."
By Natasha Korecki, Politico
01/28/2021
As he entered his first week in office, President Joe Biden was handed a priceless gift: the blissful sound of former President Donald Trump's Twitter silence.
Gone are the pre-dawn tirades, the all-caps declarations, the "Sleepy Joe" mocking, the Fox News-driven agitations and the general incitements. Instead, Biden debuted a flurry of executive orders without ever having to deal with what surely would have been rapid-fire antagonism from the man whose legacy he was dismantling.
Inside the White House, officials insist that their communications strategy hasn't changed simply because Trump is both gone and silent.
"The President spent two years ignoring Trump's distractions and staying focused on the message he wanted to deliver, and it paid off with a commanding win," a White House official said in a statement to POLITICO on Wednesday. "Whether or not Trump slinks back into public view or opens up a Parler account isn't going to make a difference in how we communicate with the American people."
But even if the strategy would have remained the same, Biden's team also concedes that the absence of Trump and his Twitter feed has been a pleasant addition to the job it's doing.
"Not having to deal with a deranged new tweet every hour? They feel blessed," an outside adviser said.
Indeed, Twitter's suspension of Trump's account has seemed to realign the political universe, minimizing diversions and interruptions as the broader conversation over Biden's agenda played out. Trump wasn't there to demand a popular uprising against Biden's federal mask-wearing mandate. His Twitter megaphone wasn't hyping the construction job losses that could come when Biden ended the Keystone XL pipeline project. Trump wasn't calling Biden a "loser" for his Covid-19 vaccination plans, or attacking Anthony Fauci as a failure he should have fired when the nation's leading infectious disease expert spoke out about how difficult it was for scientists to operate in the Trump administration.
Twitter's suspension of Trump's account has seemed to realign the political universe, minimizing diversions and interruptions as the broader conversation over Biden's agenda played out.
"It has become abundantly clear since his absence on Twitter how much Trump was driving a media narrative," said Paul Bentz, an Arizona-based Republican strategist and pollster.
Biden still has faced a steady flow of criticism during his short time in office. But nothing has come even comparably close to getting trapped in the gravitational pull of Trump's Twitter feed, which had the ability to move markets, unseat office holders and tear up news cycles again and again in a matter of hours.
"Trump had an amazing ability to distract from issues. He was able to plant seeds of doubt about entire institutions and regular democratic processes," said Philip N. Howard, director of the Oxford Internet Institute, which studies the social science of the Internet. "Having him off Twitter allows the conversation about climate change to stay on topic — and about evidence. The conversation about race and social inequality can stay focused on policy ideas."
"He was a kind of sinkhole in the media ecosystem," Howard continued, "which often trapped professional journalists into covering inane stories or simply burned them out as individuals."
While Trump's absence from Twitter has been a gift to Biden early on, it also may end up benefiting the GOP. For years, Republicans pleaded with the former president to tone down the rhetoric and allow Democrats to be judged by their own actions, rather than allow an outrageous Trump tweet to overshadow anything else during the day. Now that he's off the platform, the party may well be able to run a coordinated, cohesive campaign against the current president.
"Be careful what you wish for," said Sam Nunberg, who served as a 2016 consultant on Trump's campaign before being fired. Nunberg said of Biden and the crises facing the nation: "All the focus is now on him and it hasn't been on him. … He owns it now."
Still, recent evidence suggests that Biden will benefit in the aggregate from Trump's Twitter blackout. The former president has long taken on a role as antagonizer in chief, most prominently a decade ago when he pushed the birther issue under former President Barack Obama, questioning whether the 44th president was born in the United States. Initially, Obama viewed Trump as background noise that wasn't worth a response, as he wrote in his 2020 memoir, "A Promised Land."
But as national media gave Trump a platform — feeding oxygen to a baseless assertion — it forced Obama's hand. The then-president eventually released his long-form birth certificate and promptly lectured the media feeding into an effort built on racist undertones. After Trump's birther conspiracy withered, he moved onto creating havoc in the middle of a global health crisis. When the Ebola epidemic emerged in West Africa, Trump hounded and heckled the Obama administration on Twitter, doubting its ability to contain the disease and warning that massive spread could come to America.
In one tweet, Trump slammed Obama for having chosen "lobbyist and political hack" — and current White House chief of staff — Ron Klain as his Ebola czar. In another, Trump said of Klain: "zero experience in the medical area and zero experience in infectious disease control. A TOTAL JOKE!" He mocked Obama for golfing, and second-guessed a decision to fly U.S. doctors from Africa back to the homeland.
For the Obama team, it was deeply disruptive and complicated its efforts to manage the situation.
"A lot of the fears that gripped this country, specifically in October and November in 2014, were stirred up by Trump's tweets," Klain told POLITICO in an interview last year.
In the end, Klain was roundly applauded for staving off an Ebola outbreak in the U.S. But Trump didn't pay a price. Less than three years later, he was president.
Eric Schultz, who was with the Obama White House during Ebola, said that even with Trump gone from Twitter, obstacles remain for Biden — the top of which is a deeply divided Congress and country.
"Let's not pretend there is an unobstructed runway here for him." Schultz said. "This idea that Biden doesn't face fierce headwinds is silly."
But other Democrats are more optimistic about what the Trump-less social media landscape has in store. John Anzalone, a pollster who worked for both Biden and Obama, said that since Trump has been muted, Americans are likely feeling a sense of relief — a reset of sorts. Anzalone said it fell on the media whether to allow Trump to still play an outsized place in today's dialogue, given the violence that broke out after the Capitol riots.
"Would the press still be reporting what he says? When does it end? When does his criticism become irrelevant? At some point, it's just an angry citizen, ex-president," Anzalone said. "I don't think it would change anything the Biden administration is doing. They're just putting their heads down and getting things done."
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P.S. I love the photo of Joe they included with the above article. It captures a terrific expression on his face, a bit ornery, victorious, happy, settling in to a role of power. At least that’s how I see it.
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All that we are is the result of what we have thought; it is founded upon our thoughts, it is made up of our thoughts. If one speaks or acts with an evil thought, pain follows that person, as the wheel follows the foot of the ox that draws the carriage. If one speaks or acts with a pure thought, happiness follows that person, like a shadow that never leaves. -Gautama Buddha
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