At around 11 p.m. Vietnam time on July 2, CNBC reported that the S&P 500 index rose after President Donald Trump announced that the U.S. had reached a trade agreement with Vietnam.

The S&P 500 gained 0.3%, while the Nasdaq Composite rose 0.7%. The Dow Jones Industrial Average climbed 48 points, or 0.1%.

“The S&P 500 advanced after President Trump posted about the U.S.-Vietnam agreement on his social media platform, Truth Social, although he provided no further details. Shares of Nike—which manufactures about half of its footwear in Vietnam and China—jumped 3% following the announcement,” CNBC noted.

Earlier that day, U.S. markets had been under pressure after the latest report from payroll processor ADP showed that the U.S. private sector lost 33,000 jobs last month. This was the first monthly decline in ADP’s jobs report since March 2023. Economists had expected an increase of about 100,000 jobs.

According to Vietnam’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs, at around 8 p.m. on July 2, General Secretary Tô Lâm held a phone call with President Trump to discuss U.S.-Vietnam relations and ongoing negotiations over retaliatory tariffs between the two countries.

Both leaders welcomed the conclusion of a Joint U.S.-Vietnam Statement outlining the framework for a reciprocal, fair, and balanced trade agreement. President Trump confirmed that the U.S. would significantly reduce retaliatory tariffs on many Vietnamese exports.

On Truth Social the same day, Trump posted: “I just reached a trade agreement with Vietnam. Details to follow!”

Back in April, President Trump had announced a series of new tariffs targeting multiple trading partners—Vietnam faced a proposed rate of 46%—but enforcement had been postponed for 90 days to allow time for negotiations.

Related

Source: Vietnam Insider

Filings show he has over $1 million in Ether.

Donald Trump holds between $1 million -$5 million in Ether (ETH), and has significant income from non-fungible tokens (NFT) licensing fees, according to election disclosures

While the filings list a non-specific amount of Ether, Arkham Intelligence lists the holdings of Trump’s wallet at $3.6 million.

Aside from the Ether holdings filings show that Trump made $7.15 million through a licensing agreement with a firm called NFT INT, and the former first lady, Melania Trump, had $330,609 in income from the sales of NFTs.

OpenSea data shows that the Trump Digital Trading Cards have had over 15,808 ETH in trading volume since their debut. In July, Trump said he plans to release another NFT collection.

Despite Trump’s earlier endorsement of crypto, the former President didn’t mention it during a X space interview with Elon Musk nor did he mention it during a recent press conference where he addressed a variety of other topics related to his campaign.

Recently, the Trump Organization, the holding company for former U.S. President Donald Trump’s business ventures, announced it will unveil a cryptocurrency initiative, CoinDesk reported.

Related

Source: Vietnam Insider

The former U.S.president launched a NFT series last year.

Former U.S. president Donald Trump holds up to $500,000 in an Ethereum wallet, a recently released filing with the U.S. Office of Government Ethics revealed.

Trump, who is running for the oval office again in 2024, has been a long standing crypto skeptic. However, he released a collection of non-fungible token (NFT) cards last year featuring images of him, which sold out in hours.

In April, he released a second series of these cards which also sold out but momentum for the cards cooled off. Filings showed he had made between $500,000 and $1 million from this deal.

Trump is far ahead of other Republican candidates in the national polling. CoinDesk reached out to Trump’s office for a comment on his holdings.

Related

Source: Vietnam Insider

• Tibet, the Uygurs, the South China Sea and even Hong Kong are among the concerns for groups that insist Beijing is a threat not only to Vietnam, but the world at large

David Tran has dedicated most of his life to campaigning for the fall of the communist party-controlled government in Vietnam.

Like many members of the Vietnamese diaspora in the United States, Tran, who immigrated as a teenager more than three decades ago, has long dreamed of the day when his homeland embraces liberal democracy.

These days, though, Tran, who runs the Texas-based Vietnam Democracy Centre, increasingly has another one-party state in his sights: China.

“We look at the vision of the future, a future led by the Chinese Communist Party through the images of Tibet and Xinjiang and the South China Sea and even Hong Kong … and we don’t accept that future for our children and our grandchildren,” said Tran, who works as a medical doctor.

For many Vietnamese-Americans who spent years or even decades involved in advocacy against Hanoi, China’s rise has refocused their efforts to raise awareness of democracy, human rights and the dangers of communism.

While sharing many of the same concerns as activists elsewhere, such as the treatment of Uygurs in Xinjiang, the diaspora’s opposition to Beijing has often honed in on grievances affecting the homeland, including the territorial dispute between China and Vietnam over the South China Sea.

Earlier this year, more than 80 Vietnamese diaspora groups, many of them based in the US, carried out an unofficial “referendum” through social media to give the Vietnamese public a chance to air their views on Beijing’s expansive claims and military build-up in the waters.

Ninety-five per cent of respondents said they favoured taking legal action against Beijing in international courts, according to the poll, which organisers claimed reached some 1.2 million Vietnamese inside the country. Hanoi has hinted at but so far not pursued international arbitration to resolve the dispute over the strategic waterway, which is home to valuable fish stocks and energy reserves and carries an estimated one-third of global shipping. In 2016, the Philippines successfully argued that Beijing’s claims over most of the waterway – where Taiwan, Malaysia and Brunei also have competing claims – were without basis in law at an international tribunal at The Hague.

Tran, who helped organise the poll, said Hanoi would never defend the country’s sovereignty from an encroaching Chinese presence.

“Vietnam and China shared the same communist ideology,” he said. “Taking a stronger stance means a break from that ideology, which may lead to a disruption of that same political order and governance structures. Vietnam and China are police states, with close cooperation between the two internal security apparatuses.”

Tuong Vu, a professor of political science at the University of Oregon, said that diaspora activists had begun taking a particular interest in issues such as the South China Sea after the killing of nine Vietnamese fishermen accused of piracy in 2005.

“They have influenced many activists inside Vietnam who call for the Vietnamese government to undertake a stronger position vis-à-vis China as well as legal means to defend Vietnam‘s sovereignty claims,” Vu said. “Their influence may be direct through personal networks or indirect through their writings and their efforts to publicise the issues, identify strategies, and make available materials.”

Nonetheless, central to the advocacy of groups such as Vietnam Democracy Centre is the insistence that Beijing poses a threat not just to Vietnam, but the world at large.

Some activists involved in the South China Sea campaign have set about lobbying to have the Chinese Communist Party designated as a transnational criminal organisation, a cause taken up by Republican Congressman Scott Perry, who on October 1 introduced a related bill in the US House of Representatives.

“This bill speaks up for all victims of coronavirus spreading throughout the world,” said Tran Anh, a supporter of the bill who immigrated to the US in 1979 and runs the Viet 2000 Foundation in Dallas, Texas. “It is time for us to raise our voice before it is too late.”

Vietnam’s relations with China have been historically fraught, with the sides fighting a string of border conflicts before normalising ties in 1991. In a 2017 Pew survey, just 10 per cent of Vietnamese said they had a positive view of their larger neighbour.

Those historical grievances have been aggravated in recent years by repeated confrontations in the South China Sea, including a weeks-long stand-off in 2014 after a Chinese company deployed an oil rig in the waters, sparking riots across the Southeast Asian country.

Will Nguyen, a Vietnamese-American democracy activist based in the United States, said anti-Chinese expansionism was “deeply ingrained in the minds of nearly every Vietnamese person.”

“Many activists abroad are hawkish on China because it dovetails with their dislike of the Vietnamese Communist Party,” said Nguyen. “Historically, this makes sense as both parties share similar origins and obviously run very similar one-party authoritarian states today.”

But Nguyen said efforts by the diaspora to pressure China had limited potential as the same activists stood in opposition to the Vietnamese government.

“Thus, any kind of unified effort to curb China‘s actions – and it must be unified – is dead on arrival,” Nguyen said.

Ahead of the US presidential election on November 3, many politically-engaged Vietnamese-Americans are hoping for the re-election of Donald Trump, favouring his and the Republican Party’s hawkish stance on China. In a survey carried out last month by APIAVote, AAPI Data and Asian Americans Advancing Justice, 48 per cent of Vietnamese-Americans said they favoured Trump, compared to 36 per cent who preferred his Democratic challenger Joe Biden.

“President Trump and his current administration are aware that the dragon has awakened,” said Linh Nguyen of the Minh Van Foundation. “The others are still hoping that China is acting in good faith.”

Nguyen-vo Thu-huong, an associate professor of Asian-American Studies at University of California, Los Angeles, said traditional opposition toward China and communism among the diaspora was now being conflated by some activists with support for Trump and his wider agenda.

“Rallies may still be anti-China, but that has now become part of the message about why Vietnamese in the diaspora should be pro Trump and against any perceived enemies to Trump and his vision of America,” she said. “Since the pandemic and George Floyd, anti-China sentiments have been mobilised for Trump, against pandemic restrictions, against other Democratic politicians.”

Tran, the head of the Vietnam Democracy Centre, said he was not focused on the outcome of the election, but on continuing to spread his message to the world.

“We are not in the business of forecasting winners and losers,” he said. “We know that, regardless of who wins, our task is still the same. Our job is to inform the public and our elected representatives from all levels of government and from all governments, that communism is bad and evil.”

By John Power. Read original post on SCMP

The U.S. President Donald Trump said Friday that he held off on imposing sanctions against China over Beijing’s detention of Uighur Muslims in Xinjiang province due to ongoing U.S.-China trade negotiations.

During an interview with Axios, the president was asked why his administration declined to impose sanctions over the issue prior to his decision in recent days to sign a bill imposing sanctions on several Chinese officials and calling on the State Department to file a report on Chinese suppression of its Uighur Muslim minority.

“Well, we were in the middle of a major trade deal,” the president told the news outlet.

“And when you’re in the middle of a negotiation and then all of a sudden you start throwing additional sanctions on — we’ve done a lot,” he added, according to Axios. “I put tariffs on China, which are far worse than any sanction you can think of.”

Trump also said during the interview that no lawmakers had pressured him to impose sanctions against China under previously passed authority granted to him by the Global Magnitsky Act of 2016, a law allowing the U.S. administration to impose sanctions on individuals it sees as human rights violators.

“If somebody asked me, I would take a look at it,” he told Axios. “But nobody’s asked me. I have not been spoken to about the Magnitsky Act. So if somebody asks me about it, I’d study it. But at this moment, they have not asked me about it.”

In book excerpts made public the same day the president signed the legislation, his former national security adviser John Bolton claimed that Trump had encouraged Chinese President Xi Jinping to construct the widely condemned camps that human rights experts say are being used to indoctrinate Uighur Muslims.

“According to our interpreter, Trump said that Xi should go ahead with building the camps, which Trump thought was exactly the right thing to do,” Bolton wrote, according to the excerpts. “The National Security Council’s top Asia staffer, Matthew Pottinger, told me that Trump said something very similar during his November 2017 trip to China.”

@ The Hill

A Department of Defense adviser has resigned, effective immediately, from the military’s science board, citing what he believed to be a violation of conduct from Secretary of Defense Mark Esper.

In his resignation letter to Esper, which was obtained by The Washington Post, James Miller Jr., who served as the US undersecretary of defense for policy from 2012 to 2014, recalled that he swore an oath of office to “support and defend the Constitution of the United States” and “to bear true faith and allegiance to the same,” similar to what the defense secretary had done before he took office.

“On Monday, June 1, 2020, I believe that you violated that oath,” Miller wrote to Esper.

Miller’s reasoning centered on President Donald Trump’s visit Monday to St. John’s Church in Washington, DC, where police cleared peaceful protesters with tear gas so that he could pose with a Bible for photographs.

Secretary of Defense Mark Esper with President Donald Trump during a ceremony in the Oval Office on July 23. Carolyn Kaster / Associated Press

Rev. Mariann Edgar Budde, the Episcopal bishop, described the scene to CNN and The Washington Post as an “abuse of sacred symbols” amid “a backdrop for a message antithetical to the teachings of Jesus and everything that our churches stand for.”

Budde told The Post that she “was not given even a courtesy call” that authorities would be clearing the area “with tear gas so they could use one of our churches as a prop.”

Esper, along with US Army Gen. Mark Milley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, was also present during the visit.

@ Business Insider

After long refusing to explicitly criticize a sitting president, former Defense Secretary Jim Mattis accused President Donald Trump on Wednesday of trying to divide America and roundly denounced a militarization of the U.S. response to civil unrest.

They accompany a growing affirmation from within the Pentagon’s leadership of the U.S. military’s core values, including to uphold a constitution that protects freedom of assembly and the principles of equality.

“Donald Trump is the first president in my lifetime who does not try to unite the American people — does not even pretend to try,” Mattis, who resigned as Trump’s defense secretary in 2018, wrote in a statement published by The Atlantic.

“Instead he tries to divide us. We are witnessing the consequences of three years of this deliberate effort.”

Trump has turned to militaristic rhetoric in response to demonstrations against police brutality following Floyd’s killing by a white police officer, who knelt on the unarmed man’s neck for almost nine minutes in Minneapolis last week.

On Monday Trump threatened to send active duty U.S. troops to stamp out civil unrest gripping several cities, against the wishes of state governors – alarming current and former military officials who fear dissent in the ranks and lasting damage to the U.S. military itself, one of America’s most revered and well-funded institutions.

“Militarizing our response, as we witnessed in Washington, D.C., sets up a conflict — a false conflict — between the military and civilian society,” Mattis wrote.

Trump reacted on Twitter by calling Mattis “the world’s most overrated General!”

“I didn’t like his ‘leadership’ style or much else about him, and many others agree. Glad he is gone!” Trump wrote.

A prominent figure in military circles, Mattis’s strong words could inspire others in uniform and veterans to speak out. They are particularly surprising given his extreme reluctance to criticize Trump in scores of interviews and appearances since he left office over policy differences with the U.S. president.

His comments follow denunciations by other retired top brass, including Navy admiral Mike Mullen and retired Army general Martin Dempsey, both former chairmen of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

The current chairman, Army General Mark Milley, issued a message to the armed forces reminding them of their oath to uphold the U.S. Constitution, which gives Americans the right to “freedom of speech and peaceful assembly.” Similar messages were delivered by other top military leaders.

COMPARISON TO BATTLE AGAINST NAZIS

As he called for unity, Mattis even drew a comparison to the U.S. war against Nazi Germany, saying U.S. troops were reminded before the Normandy invasion: “The Nazi slogan for destroying us … was ‘Divide and Conquer.’ Our American answer is ‘In Union there is Strength.’”

Mattis also took a swipe at current U.S. military leadership for participating in a Monday photo-op led by Trump after law enforcement – including National Guard – cleared away peaceful protesters.

He criticized use of the word “battlespace” by Defense Secretary Mark Esper and Milley to describe protest sites in the United States during a call with state governors this week. Esper, Mattis’s successor in the job, has said he regretted using that wording.

“We must reject any thinking of our cities as a ‘battlespace,’” Mattis wrote.

Esper said at a Wednesday news conference he did not support invoking the Insurrection Act to deploy active-duty forces to quell civil unrest for now, in remarks that did not go over well with either the president or his top aides, an administration official said.

The head of the National Guard, whose troops have been reinforcing local law enforcement, issued a strong statement (here) condemning racism and reminding his troops of their oath to the constitution.

“If we are to fulfill our obligation as service members, as Americans, as decent human beings, we have to take our oath seriously,” said Air Force General Joseph Lengyel, the chief of the Guard. “We cannot tolerate racism, discrimination or casual violence. We cannot abide divisiveness and hate.”

The remarks by Mattis, an influential retired Marine general who resigned over policy differences in 2018, are the strongest to date by a former Pentagon leader over Trump’s response to the killing of George Floyd, an African-American, while in Minneapolis police custody.

FILE PHOTO: U.S. President Donald Trump speaks to the news media while gathering for a briefing from his senior military leaders, including Defense Secretary James Mattis (L), in the Cabinet Room at the White House in Washington, U.S., October 23, 2018. REUTERS/Leah Millis/File Photo

Reporting by Phil Stewart; Editing by Cynthia Osterman, Richard Pullin and Stephen Coates @ Reuters

The U.S President Donald Trump on Friday announced he would begin taking steps to revoke Hong Kong’s favored trade status with the United States, in response to a controversial new security law passed by China’s parliament that would effectively bar political protest in Hong Kong.

“I am directing my administration to begin the process of eliminating policy exemptions that give Hong Kong different and special treatment,” Trump said during a Rose Garden event at the White House.

“My announcement today will affect the full range of agreements that we have with Hong Kong, from our extradition treaty, to our export controls and technologies,” Trump said. “We will take action to revoke Hong Kong’s preferential treatment as a separate customs and travel territory from the rest of China.”

The shift in Hong Kong’s status immediately jeopardizes several aspects of the former British colony’s relationship with the United States, which has so far meant that Hong Kong has been spared punishing tariffs that are a hallmark of Trump’s trade war with Beijing.

But Trump did not provide details about precisely which steps would be taken or in what order, and a White House spokesman declined to comment when CNBC asked for additional clarification on the expected moves.

Trump also said he was ready to take action to mandate that Chinese and other foreign companies listed on U.S. financial exchanges abide by American accounting and audit standards.

The issue has long been a source of frustration among Washington policymakers, several of whom have introduced legislation that would bar trading in any shares where the company’s auditor hasn’t faced an inspection from the Public Company Accounting Oversight Board for three consecutive years. 

Trump has not said whether he will sign the bill, which is currently making its way through Congress.

But the president did say Friday that he would instruct his “presidential working group on financial markets to study the different practices of Chinese companies listed on the U.S. financial markets, with a goal of protecting American investors.” 

“Investment firms should not be subjecting their clients to the hidden and undue risks associated with financing Chinese companies that do not play by the same rules,” said Trump, adding that “Americans are entitled to fairness and transparency.”

A White House spokesman did not immediately respond to a question from CNBC about whether Trump would sign the legislation if it gets to his desk.

During the same address, Trump also announced that the United States would be terminating its relationship with the World Health Organization, a move likely to draw criticism from public health experts and U.S. allies.

The president said the organization had failed to make “the requested and greatly needed reforms,” and he blamed the global health group for a lack of “transparency.”  

Trump did not take any questions from reporters after he finished speaking.

Financial markets reacted positively to Trump’s announcement, reflecting overall relief that he did not announce some of the more drastic and punitive measures that analysts and investors had feared he might. These included additional tariffs on Chinese products, broad sanctions and a withdrawal from the U.S.-China trade deal. 

For weeks, the Trump administration has been ratcheting up pressure on Beijing over its alleged cover-up of early coronavirus cases. Trump has publicly blamed China for the virus itself and for its outsized severity in the United States.

Beijing, in turn, has suggested the virus originated in U.S. service members, a claim widely rejected by international health experts. 

In the past week, however, the pressure from the United States has taken a more serious turn in response to a proposed Chinese security law that threatens the long-standing semi-autonomy of Hong Kong. The law, formally approved Thursday by China’s People’s Congress, is expected to criminalize most forms of political protest under blanket bans on “sedition” and “subversion.”  

On Wednesday, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo delivered a report to Congress declaring that Hong Kong was no longer autonomous from China. 

“No reasonable person can assert today that Hong Kong maintains a high degree of autonomy from China, given facts on the ground,” Pompeo said in a statement accompanying the report. 

Even as relations have grown more hostile, Trump has been reluctant to take action on China that could tip the strained bilateral relationship into an outright confrontation.

As president, Trump is acutely aware of the United States’ interdependence with China as a market for American exports and a supplier of manufactured goods. He also still believes that his “phase one” trade deal, signed in January, can and will be seen as one of the high points of his presidency, fulfilling a key campaign promise he made in 2016. 

Likewise, since the coronavirus arrived in the U.S., Trump has shown little appetite for signing any legislation he thinks could hinder the economic recovery. 

@ CNBC

The US President Donald Trump signed an executive order targeting social media companies on Thursday, days after Twitter called two of his tweets “potentially misleading.”

Speaking from the Oval Office ahead of signing the order, Trump said the move was to “defend free speech from one of the gravest dangers it has faced in American history.”

“A small handful of social media monopolies controls a vast portion of all public and private communications in the United States,” he claimed. “They’ve had unchecked power to censor, restrict, edit, shape, hide, alter, virtually any form of communication between private citizens and large public audiences.”

The executive order tests the boundaries of the White House’s authority. In a long-shot legal bid, it seeks to curtail the power of large social media platforms by reinterpreting a critical 1996 law that shields websites and tech companies from lawsuits. But legal experts on both the right and the left have raised serious concerns about the proposal. They say it may be unconstitutional because it risks infringing on the First Amendment rights of private companies and because it attempts to circumvent the two other branches of government.

“(Trump) is trying to steal for himself the power of the courts and Congress to rewrite decades of settled law,” said Democratic Sen. Ron Wyden of Oregon, the architect of the legislation that the order seeks to reinterpret. “He decides what’s legal based on what’s in his interest.”

The order marks a dramatic escalation by Trump in his war with tech companies as they struggle with the growing problem of misinformation on social media. The President has regularly accused sites of censoring conservative speech.

On Thursday, Trump acknowledged that legal challenges to the order are on the horizon, saying he was “sure they’ll be doing a lawsuit.”

“I guess it’s going to be challenged in court, what isn’t?” he asked. “But I think we’re going to do very well.”

The text of the order, which was reviewed by CNN, targets a law known as the Communications Decency Act. Section 230 of the legislation provides broad immunity to websites that curate and moderate their own platforms, and has been described by legal experts as “the 26 words that created the internet.”

It argues that the protections hinge mainly on tech platforms operating in “good faith,” and that social media companies have not.

“In a country that has long cherished the freedom of expression, we cannot allow a limited number of online platforms to hand-pick the speech that Americans may access and convey on the internet,” the order says. “This practice is fundamentally un-American and anti-democratic. When large, powerful social media companies censor opinions with which they disagree, they exercise a dangerous power.”

On Tuesday, Twitter applied a fact-check to two of Trump’s tweets, including one that claimed, without evidence, that mail-in ballots would lead to widespread voter fraud. Trump immediately shot back, accusing the social media giant of censorship and warning that if it continued to offer addendums to his messages, he would use the power of the federal government to rein it in or even shut it down.

The order accuses social media platforms of “invoking inconsistent, irrational, and groundless justifications to censor or otherwise punish Americans’ speech here at home.” It specifically cites Twitter for “selectively” applying warning labels to “certain tweets.” It also faults Google for helping the Chinese government surveil its citizens; Twitter for spreading Chinese propaganda; and Facebook for profiting from Chinese advertising.

Tech companies are pushing back on the order.

Facebook and Google said Trump’s proposal risks harming the internet and digital economy.

“By exposing companies to potential liability for everything that billions of people around the world say, this would penalize companies that choose to allow controversial speech and encourage platforms to censor anything that might offend anyone,” Facebook spokesman Andy Stone said in a statement.

“Our platforms have empowered a wide range of people and organizations from across the political spectrum, giving them a voice and new ways to reach their audiences,” Google spokeswoman Riva Sciuto said. “Undermining Section 230 in this way would hurt America’s economy and its global leadership on internet freedom.”

Twitter declined to comment.

A fight Trump wants to have

The move highlights what Trump believes is a fight worth having. In many ways, the latest episode with Twitter feeds Trump’s narrative that there are powerful forces in the media aligned against him, and that his is the only voice his supporters can trust.

“This plays right into President Trump’s hands,” said Jason Miller, the communications director for Trump’s 2016 campaign and someone who has been directly involved with Trump’s social media strategy. “They basically handed him a massive gift.”

Many of Trump’s political allies rushed to his defense on Wednesday.

“Twitter is engaging in 2020 election interference. They are putting their thumb on the scale,” said Florida Republican Rep. Matt Gaetz, a loyal Trump supporter and surrogate during an appearance on the Steve Bannon-produced podcast War Room Pandemic. “The notion that they would outsource fact checking to people who have been wrong about everything is an insult.”

Trump campaign manager Brad Parscale said that his team no longer pays for advertising on Twitter and accused the tech giant of purposefully influencing the election to hurt the President.

“We always knew that Silicon Valley would pull out all the stops to obstruct and interfere with President Trump getting his message through to voters,” Parscale said in a statement. “Partnering with the biased fake news media ‘fact checkers’ is only a smoke screen Twitter is using to try to lend their obvious political tactics some false credibility.”

The President made the decision to warn Twitter despite the fact that the company and most other prominent social media platforms have allowed him and his associates to peddle unsubstantiated conspiracy theories with few constraints. While Twitter added the fact check to Trump’s tweets on mail-in voting, it did not do so on any of his recent tweets baselessly suggesting MSNBC host Joe Scarborough was somehow involved in the death of a former aide, despite a plea from the aide’s widower to take the tweets down.

<img alt=”Fact-checking Trump&amp;#39;s recent claims that mail-in voting is rife with fraud” class=”media__image” src=”//cdn.cnn.com/cnnnext/dam/assets/200527070026-01-trump-tweet-fact-check-0526-large-169.jpg”>

Trump’s Twitter habits have been scrutinized for virtually his entire political career, but people familiar with his use of the platform describe less of a strategy and more of a mindset as he or an aide taps out messages.

Other people inside the administration, and even some of Trump’s closest advisers, are regularly caught off-guard by what appears on his feed — if not always surprised.

While his messages often have the effect of distracting from an unfortunate headline, people close to the President say it is their impression that he genuinely believes many of the more conspiratorial things he sends — including debunked theories about his predecessor — and that he isn’t raising them only in the hopes of diverting attention elsewhere.

Trump’s top social media adviser, Dan Scavino Jr., was recently elevated to become one of the highest-ranking officials in the West Wing. His title, deputy chief of staff for communications, belies the fundamental role he plays both in Trump’s use of Twitter and in his life generally. Trump trusts Scavino almost unreservedly. Scavino has worked for the President since before the 2016 campaign when he was a manager at one of Trump’s golf clubs.

Scavino is usually the person who locates the internet content — sometimes from fringe sources and often incendiary — that finds it way to Trump’s Twitter feed, though other friends and advisers have suggested tweets and retweets as well.

Scavino’s West Wing office provides him regular access to the President, as does his near-ubiquitous presence on Trump’s trips, where he is often seen videotaping or photographing the President. He is believed to be the only other person with access to @RealDonaldTrump, though the mechanics of the account have never been confirmed by the White House.

Trump’s tweet rants have always been controversial. But recently, as the US death toll from the pandemic has approached 100,000, they have become uncomfortable even for some of the President’s most prominent supporters.

“I do think the President should stop tweeting about Joe Scarborough in the middle of a pandemic,” said Rep. Liz Cheney, a Wyoming Republican. “He’s the commander in chief of this nation and he is causing great pain to the family of the young woman who died.”

But those who understand the President’s social media habits believe it is unlikely that he will change his behavior any time soon. Miller, who has been present as Trump crafts his tweets, said the President views the platform as an outlet where he can speak directly to his supporters.

“It is one of President Trump’s super powers,” Miller said. “He understood very early on that social media, Twitter in particular, gave him unvarnished access to the American people and his supporters. What Trump maximized was social media’s ability to bypass the artificial conversation created by the mainstream media.”

How the order would work

Under the order, the Commerce Department would ask the Federal Communications Commission for new regulations clarifying when a company’s conduct might violate the good faith provisions of Section 230 — potentially making it easier for tech companies to be sued.

That is consistent with a draft order whose text CNN first reported last summer — and which prompted FCC officials to push back on the plan privately.

“This debate is an important one. The Federal Communications Commission will carefully review any petition for rulemaking filed by the Department of Commerce,” FCC Chairman Ajit Pai said Thursday.

The order instructs the Justice Department to consult with state attorneys general on allegations of anti-conservative bias. It bans federal agencies from advertising on platforms that have allegedly violated Section 230’s good-faith principles.

Finally, the order would direct the Federal Trade Commission to report on complaints about political bias collected by the White House and to consider bringing lawsuits against companies accused of violating the administration’s interpretation of Section 230.

The provisions regarding the FTC could raise additional legal questions, as the FTC is an independent agency that does not take orders from the President.

“The FTC is committed to robust enforcement of consumer protection and competition laws, including with respect to social media platforms, and consistent with our jurisdictional authority and constitutional limitations,” FTC spokesman Peter Kaplan said Thursday.

@ CNN

The U.S. coronavirus crisis took a sharp political turn on Friday as President Donald Trump lashed out at four Democratic governors over their handling of the pandemic after having conceded that states bear ultimate control of restrictions to contain the outbreak.

The Republican president targeted three swing states critical to his re-election bid – Michigan, Minnesota and Virginia – where his conservative loyalists have mounted pressure campaigns challenging those governors’ stay-at-home orders.

Amplifying a theme that his supporters have trumpeted this week in street protests at the state capitals of Lansing, St. Paul, and Richmond, Trump issued a series of matching Twitter posts touting the slogans: “LIBERATE MICHIGAN!” “LIBERATE MINNESOTA!” and “LIBERATE VIRGINIA!”

Michigan has become a particular focus of agitation to relax social-distancing rules that rank among the strictest in the nation after Governor Gretchen Whitmer, widely seen as a potential running mate for presumed Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden, extended them through the end of April.

Protesters defying the restrictions from the steps of the state Capitol on Wednesday shouted “lock her up,” a chant that was a staple of Trump’s campaign rallies and originally referred to his 2016 Democratic rival, Hillary Clinton.

‘WHEN IT’S SAFE’

Whitmer said on Friday she was hopeful her state, which suffered one of the country’s fastest-growing coronavirus infection rates, can begin to restart parts of its economy on May 1. But she urged doing so cautiously to avoid reigniting the outbreak just as it was being brought to heel.

Responding to Trump’s critique later in the day, Whitmer said Michigan will re-engage its economy when it’s safe, adding: “The last thing I want to do is to have a second wave here.”

Trump also took renewed aim at one of his favorite political foils, New York Governor Andrew Cuomo, suggesting on Twitter that his state, the U.S. epicenter of the outbreak, had asked for too much assistance that was never fully used.

At his daily news briefing, Cuomo shot back saying Trump should “maybe get up and go to work” instead of watching TV, and accused the president of favoring the airline industry and business cronies in a recent bailout package that left little for the states.

The flare-up in political sparring came as the number of known coronavirus infections in the United States surpassed 700,000, the most of any country. At the same time, the tally of lives lost from COVID-19, the highly contagious lung disease caused by the virus, has soared to more than 35,000. New York state accounts for nearly half those deaths.

While the death toll continued to climb, the rate of hospitalizations and other indicators have been leveling off, a sign that drastic social-distancing restrictions imposed in 42 of the 50 U.S. states were working to curtail the outbreak.

Stay-at-home orders and the closure of non-essential businesses have also strangled U.S. commerce, triggering millions of layoffs and forecasts that America is headed for its deepest recession since the economic collapse of the 1930s.

The result has been mounting pressure to ease the shutdowns, leading to clashes between Trump, who had touted the strength of the U.S. economy as the best case for his re-election in November, and governors in hard-hit states who warned against lifting restrictions too quickly.

Trump, who played down the coronavirus threat in its early stages, had been pressing to restart idled businesses as soon as May 1, at first declaring “total” authority to do so and branding governors who resisted his approach, many of them Democrats, as “mutineers.”

STATE CONTROL AND TESTING

In the end Trump acknowledged it was up to the governors to decide when and how to relax the restrictions they themselves had imposed since last month, presenting new federal guidelines on Thursday as recommendations.

While the guidelines call for a phased-in, science-based strategy in keeping with the advice of leading health experts, the plan hinges on widespread testing to gauge the scope of infections and how many people might have developed immunity to the virus.

At a White House briefing on Friday, Trump’s coronavirus task force members, through statements and graphics, pushed back against criticism from some governors and lawmakers that limited testing ability is impeding the country’s return to normalcy.

“We believe today that we have the capacity in the United States to do a sufficient amount of testing for states to move into phase one in the time and manner that they deem appropriate,” Vice President Mike Pence told reporters.

Cuomo argued earlier that the Trump administration was foisting responsibility for a massive testing program on the states without providing necessary financial resources.

“Is there any funding so I can do these things that you want us to do? No. That is passing the buck without passing the bucks,” Cuomo said.

Even as Cuomo was addressing reporters, Trump immediately took to Twitter in Washington to fire back, saying he “should spend more time ‘doing’ and less time ‘complaining.’”

Trump struck a more conciliatory tone during the White House briefing. Asked about criticism leveled at him earlier in the day by Washington state Governor Jay Inslee, a Democrat who accused Trump of “fomenting domestic rebellion” with his “LIBERATE” tweets, the president demurred.

Trump denied he was suggesting that Michigan, Minnesota and Virginia lift their stay-at-home orders altogether, but added, “I think elements of what they’ve done are too much.”

Of the protesters, Trump said, “These are people expressing their views.” He added, “They seem to be very responsible to me. … But they’ve been treated a little bit rough.”

Reporting by Maria Caspani, Nathan Layne, Susan Heavey and Lisa Lambert; Writing by Grant McCool and Steve Gorman; Editing by Frank McGurty, Howard Goller and Daniel Wallis @ Reuters