Would he wear handcuffs and be fingerprinted? The Times reported that Trump was mulling whether to smile for the cameras. When Trump was indicted, last Thursday, news stories were filled with speculation about how his arrest would unfold. Because the former President had called for protests, reporters and pundits worried about the possibility of a January 6th-esque event. There was nothing that substantiated the claim or that elucidated the exact charges he might face, but the press was soon awash in stories citing his Truth Social post. It later came out that when Trump made what was ultimately an incorrect statement about his impending arrest-he was off by more than two weeks-he had inferred the timing from what his advisers had gleaned from earlier press reports. A 2022 study from the Reuters Institute found that forty-two per cent of Americans now actively avoid the news. Most of the country was just plain burned out on news following the Trump Presidency. Even Fox News has cooled on the former President a bit he only recently returned to the network after months away, and prominent hosts have struck a more Trump-skeptical tone. (Those bans have since been reversed.) Perhaps because the mainstream television networks felt some remorse for having given Trump so much free airtime during the 2016 election and beyond, his campaign rallies, which re-started a couple of months ago, have so far received much less attention. His ban from some social media, including Twitter and Facebook, meant he filtered into our feeds-and brains-less. Trump’s arraignment and pending court case, his 2024 campaign, and other potential indictments mean the country is about to be deluged with Trump news: a jarring prospect, given that the past two years provided a relative reprieve from the former President’s antics. I was struck by the mixture of ultimately inconsequential stuff (cake, tweets) with moments of life and death. used its most powerful non-nuclear bomb on ISIS targets). There were also items I had no memory of: “Don Jr tweets his email” “Beautiful chocolate cake” (Trump had the dessert right before a missile strike on Syria) “MOAB dropped” (the U.S. There was the Women’s March, the travel ban, “Covfefe,” and the firing of Sally Yates and of James Comey. The chart showed search trends around major events during Trump’s first eight months in office. An Axios graphic from September, 2017-“The insane news cycle of Trump’s presidency in 1 chart”-is a helpful reminder of that era. Musk has not commented on whether he will lift Trump’s ban.Over the past two weeks, since Donald Trump said on Truth Social that his indictment in Manhattan was imminent, the country has been in thrall to a familiar phenomenon: the frantic Trump news cycle. Musk tweeted Wednesday that “Truth Social” was a terrible name, and that “Trumpet” would have been better, remarking that the platform only existed because of Twitter’s censorship. However, Trump told CNBC earlier this week that, though he liked Musk “a lot,” he would stick to Truth Social. When Musk, who has also accused Twitter of censorship, made an unsolicited offer to buy Twitter, it sparked widespread speculation that Musk might reinstate Trump’s account. Launching February 21, Trump’s Truth Social was initially billed as a censorship-free platform, but its launch was hampered by glitches, a profusion of fake accounts and a waitlist of almost 1.5 million. Claiming to be a victim of "wildly aggressive censorship," Trump announced the formation of a social media firm called Trump Media and Technology Group in October, with plans to go public by merging with a blank check company called Digital World Acquisition Corp. Trump was permanently banned from Twitter two days after the January 6, 2021, Capitol riot, in connection to posts that Twitter said incited violence. Many media outlets concluded that Trump intended to write the phrase “constant negative press coverage.” However, White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer chafed at the notion that the garbled late-night tweet contained a typo: “I think the president and a small group of people know exactly what he meant," he said. The “COVFEFE” hashtag alludes to a now-infamous 2017 tweet in which Trump wrote, “Despite the constant negative press covfefe,” provoking much debate about Trump’s intended meaning.
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