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      For Trump and GOP, No Hope, Just the Audacity of Lies

      For Trump and GOP, No Hope, Just the Audacity of Lies

      They have nothing to sell but fear itself.

      Michael Winship
      Aug 30, 2020

      During the first Clinton term, I worked on the public TV series In Performance at the White House.

      One of our episodes was an Aretha Franklin concert on the South Lawn. The show was great. It goes without saying what a remarkable talent she was. But Ms. Franklin was demanding, too. At one point she insisted we shoot her in a designer ballgown as she made a grand entrance, coming down the stairs from the executive mansion's Truman Balcony. We cut it from the final show; for whatever reason, no matter how we tried in the editing room, it just looked cheesy.

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      Opinion
      Trump's Authoritarian Executive Order Is an Assault on Free Speech--Not a Defense of It

      Trump's Authoritarian Executive Order Is an Assault on Free Speech--Not a Defense of It

      It may be tempting to shrug off the president's spat with a social media platform, but we ignore such chilling conduct at our peril.

      Erwin Chemerinsky
      May 30, 2020

      Authoritarian rulers inevitably try to silence their critics, and President Trump did just that in his clearly illegal executive order that seeks to limit the protections social media companies have from being held liable for the content published on their platforms. I hope that we have not become so desensitized by Trump's constant misconduct as president that we have lost the ability to be outraged and frightened by something that strikes at the very heart of freedom of speech.

      The executive order signed Thursday was meant to retaliate against Twitter for calling attention to two "potentially misleading" Trump tweets. On Tuesday, Twitter had applied fact-checking to the tweets in question, in which Trump claimed that mail-in ballots would lead to widespread voter fraud. The company then appended a message to the tweets in a format it uses to combat misinformation or unverified claims: "Get the facts about mail-in ballots." Those messages linked to a fact-check page that Twitter had created that was filled with further links and summaries of news articles debunking the assertion.

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      Opinion
      What I Saw at the (American) Revolution

      What I Saw at the (American) Revolution

      The founders would say Trump mangles the Constitution even worse than he does the English language

      Michael Winship
      Jul 14, 2019

      In September 1993, Bill Clinton came to Congress to deliver an address on health care reform. But the wrong speech was in the teleprompter. This would have been an epic calamity for the current occupant of the executive mansion but President Clinton adroitly ad-libbed and remained on topic for some ten minutes while the problem was fixed.

      I knew the operator who was running the prompter that night. I worked with him at the White House on several occasions during Clinton's first term--a good guy and a consummate professional. Nevertheless, he never lived down that momentary gaffe.

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