Twitter: President doesn’t know what he’s talking about — and neither do we | Opinion

Rejected first draft of Twitter’s list of fact-checking labels for tweets by President Donald J. Trump:

“Unverifiable.” To be placed on tweets for which no factual source — published or spoken — can be found in any known human language.

“Untrue.” To be placed on tweets containing obviously false statements such as, “We have done a great job on Testing, Ventilators and everything else,” or, “Mexico is paying for the Wall.”

“Unhinged.” To be placed on tweets in which every other word has been typed in all-capital letters, and multiple exclamation points are the only recognizable punctuation.

“Sleep-deprived rambling.” To be placed on all tweets posted between 2 a.m. and 4:30 a.m. Eastern Daylight Time.

“Over-caffeinated rambling.” To be placed on all post-dawn tweets in which the president needlessly repeats words or phrases, indicating an excessive intake of Coca-Cola products.

“Paranoid rambling.” To be placed on all tweets about muddy conspiracy theories implicating (but not limited to) the following: Hillary Clinton, the FBI, the liberal media, Barack Obama, Bill Gates, the World Health Organization and Ted Cruz’s father.

“He’s not being sarcastic, or making a joke. He really believes this crap!” To be placed on tweets that are so phenomenally idiotic that the president will later claim he wasn’t really serious when he wrote them.

“Caution: The president is not a medical doctor.” To be placed on tweets in which the president ponders or touts an untested, unapproved treatment for a dangerous disease.

“Stop! Put the cap on the bleach! He doesn’t know what the hell he’s talking about it!” To be placed on subsequent tweets in which the president continues to promote whack-a-doodle cures for potentially lethal illnesses.

“Caution: The president is not a psychiatrist.” To be placed on tweets in which the president casually speculates that one of his political critics (either Democrat or Republican) has a specific mental disorder.

“OK, this one he actually got from a crazy person.” To be placed on presidential re-tweets of comments made by individuals with specific mental disorders.

“First heard on Fox.” To be placed on tweets in which the president steals a line, phrase or idea from a Fox News television personality, pretends he made it up himself and posts it over and over.

“Caution: The president does not own a dictionary.” To be placed on tweets in which at least three (3) common words are misspelled. In extreme cases, a disclaimer will be added restating Twitter’s strict policy against editing the content of account holders, no matter how dumb it makes the account holder appear.

“Somebody else wrote this one, for sure.” To be placed on tweets that are posted while the president is playing golf or applying bronzer, when his Twitter account is being by handled by senior staff. The giveaway is their proper grammar and syntax.

“Caution: The president is not a certified accountant.” To be placed on tweets that toss around confusing or misleading statistics about the U.S. economy, the deficit, the COVID-19 stimulus package, the stock market, TV ratings for press conferences and the president’s weight.

“Don’t waste your time trying to fact-check this one. Seriously, he just pulled the numbers out of his a--.” To be placed on tweets in which the president simply makes up his own statistics and doesn’t even bother to fake a legitimate source.

“Caution: The president doesn’t actually have the power to do this.” To be placed on any tweet in which the president threatens to take an action for which he has no legal authority, such as opening all churches in the midst of a pandemic, or shutting down a particular social media just because he’s pouting about something.

“If Twitter had a shred of human decency, we would immediately take this post down. But we don’t, so we won’t.” To be placed on tweets in which the president implies that somebody he doesn’t like actually murdered a person, when in fact the person died from a serious medical condition, a tragedy dredged up in a vicious way that torments the grieving family.

“Your guess is as good as ours.” To be placed on tweets in which the president types something so jumbled that we have no clue what it means and, therefore, cannot positively state whether it’s a deliberate falsehood, or he accidentally sat on his cell phone.

This story was originally published May 29, 2020 at 7:51 PM.