What are your thoughts on Twitter clash between Trump and British PM?

The Administration is destroying any chance at cooperation and comity with every nation on earth except Russia. The United Kingdom has enjoyed a “special relationship” with the United States for over 100 years; that is now coming to an end.

I think May was correct in calling him out for it and I hope the Brits follow through and cancel the official state visit from Trump. ‘course he will say he was not gonna go anyway.

Trump likes dictators and does not seem to care much for those who support democracy.

Churchill and FDR are probably rolling over in their graves.

The tweets Trump reposted are disturbing as they were posted by Jayda Fransen of the far right Britain First movement. This is an extremist organisation that has conducted “Christian Patrols” in areas of East London, has invaded mosques and provocatively emptied cans of beer outside mosques to “bait Islamic extremists”.

Its leader, Paul Golding, was jailed for breaking a court order banning him from entering mosques and Jayda Fransen herself has been found guilty of religious harassment and breaches of the Public Order Act 1936. She is due to appear in Belfast Magistrate’s Court on 14 December charged with using “threatening, abusive or insulting words or behaviour”.

Theresa May had no choice but to respond to Trump’s apparent endorsement of this movement and she has received widespread support from public figures in the UK for doing so.

Trump obviously made no attempt to check the veracity of the videos before reposting. The first, which supposedly shows a “Muslim immigrant” attacking a Dutch man on crutches, was discredited by the Dutch Public Prosecution Service who advised that the person arrested for the attack was born and raised in the Netherlands and was not a migrant.

The second video shows a man smashing a statue of the Virgin Mary. This video was uploaded to YouTube in 2013 and the man in the clip says ““No-one but Allah will be worshipped in the land of the Levant” suggesting a location of Syria rather than Western Europe.

The third video originates from the disturbances that took place in Egypt in 2013 and shows a man being pushed from the top of a building in Alexandria. Those responsible were prosecuted in 2015 and one man was executed.

Questions are now being asked about Trump’s visit to the UK. Many here feel he shouldn’t come. It is a completely unnecessary controversy that I can’t imagine happening with any leader other than Trump.

Here is Trump’s Report Card from Diplomacy and International Relations Class:

1) Interrupts others constantly

2) Does not play well with others

3) Only listens when someone hands him Cash

4) Needs to go to Etiquette and Proper Dress classes offered at Junior high

I think Trump shows amazing immaturity in voicing idiotic opinions on Twitter. I think the May should officially have no say in anything he tweets out, especially when it shows she is pandering to the muslims in her nation. I think they are both idiots.

@seawulf575 you do understand his reaction was to B O G U S right-wing propaganda from Europe right? ? ?

@Tropical_Willie I have stated a number of times that I am an independent. I go by the person and not the party or ideology. I certainly tend to the right, I will give you that. But I have stated a number of times I felt Trump’s use of Twitter, while I felt it was a brilliant way to bypass the MSM during the campaign, isn’t a very professional aspect for a president. And May jumping into the fray was just foolish. If England was an idyllic place, I might accept her coaching and give credence to her opinion. As it is, it came off as foolish to me.
I think the problem I have with most discussions on Fluther is that I tend to be more fair than most. I look at things and evaluate individuals and situations without getting into blind following of either. If Trump does something foolish, I have no problem calling it out. But likewise, when I see a feeding frenzy over something he does or say based solely on opinion or innuendo, I call that out as well. That goes for basically all persons and topics I address. If you ever notice, I will generally chime in from the middle perspective. Roy Moore: If he was actually guilty of the crimes, I’m all for castrating him. But I can’t get there on day one of an unproven accusation. Trump Impeachment: If he was actually guilty of a crime, I don’t make excuses for him. But from before he actually was sworn in, people were screaming and scheming for his impeachment. No actual crimes, just impeach him. Makes all other efforts to get to facts tainted. You can go back and look. This is how I roll. The biggest arguments I have on these pages involve those that are motivated by ideology or that do accept innuendo as fact and cannot get past that.

@seawulf575 Britain First is a small group of extremists intent on fomenting religious trouble in the UK. As a political party it has failed to achieve any electoral success. Four weeks ago it was deregistered by the UK’s elections watchdog, the Electoral Commission, after it failed to confirm that its registered details were correct and pay a routine fee of £25.

The party cannot now contest ballots, and the digital world appears to be the only space within which it might thrive. That the President of the United States should give support to this disreputable group by reposting its spurious tweets was not something the British Prime Minister could ignore and it would have been very damaging for her politically had she not responded.

@flutherother That is where you and I differ in opinion. If they are a small group of extremists, why give them credibility by even acknowledging the comment from Trump? It would be like Angela Merkel tweeting support for the American Neo-Nazis, a small, inconsequential extremist group. If she did, it would make her look like the idiot. To jump in and respond, you are giving credibility to the whole thing. Unless there was some claim that she supported some bizarre actions of theirs, stay out of it.

@seawulf575 Can’t you see it was Trump that gave Britain First credibility by retweeting their inflammatory posts? Theresa May only said she thought it was a mistake to do that and almost everyone over here agrees with her.

@flutherother I agree that Trump pulled a bone-headed move. But here’s where if falls apart. Trump spews an idiotic tweet. He’s the idiot. It does absolutely nothing to May OR the British people, other than to show how immature Trump is. By responding, May gives credibility not just to Trump, but to the idiotic group with whatever doltish video they had. Now she gets embroiled in a situation where she has thrown herself into the fray, inviting response. Let’s look at it from the “what if” situation: What If she had not responded at all. What would have happened? Most likely the entire situation would have blown away like so much chafe in the wind. Politically she would have been just fine and no one would have given two hoots about the video. By responding, it is now international news. So which action would have defused the situation more quickly? Which would have put less focus on Trump or the video? Additionally, it puts her politically into a position where her actions can be viewed as overt support for Muslims over Christians. Yes, I know the Christians are the bad guys here, but lets be honest…Muslims haven’t endeared themselves as a group anywhere they go. So now, she gives political ammunition to any of her opponents to use against her. Let me give an example: “Muslims committed several acts of terrorism in the UK including the Westminster Bridge attacks, the Manchester Arena suicide bombing as well as the London Bridge and Borough Market incidents. These are the people she is supporting while going after those other horrible people (British Citizens) that pour beer at the doors of mosques.”
You know as well as I do that anything can be spun in the world of politics. THAT is why I feel she was foolish for jumping on that bandwagon. I grew up with a saying: Don’t wrestle with pigs, the pigs like it and you just get dirty.

^But sadly that person happens to be President of the United States. He’s endorsing a group which is banned in Britain. Keeping mum over this issue wasn’t the choice for Brits otherwise it would have been considered as approval of his views. I think she has done the right thing by letting Trump know that he isn’t supporting right people. I don’t think it will result in any publicity of the group in any way possible.

^So why isn’t May coming out against Iran or Saudi Arabia or Turkey or China or any of the other places that support those that don’t support “the right people”? I’m not defending Trump…my statements thus far should show that. But the problem is that May turned a poor statement from the POTUS that would have gone by the wayside without publicity, into international news and therefore set herself up for future political issues. If she wanted to clock Trump, it would have been more appropriate to call him or have the ambassador to the US drop off the message that he isn’t helping and is causing problems. She opted for a public display which drags her right into the mire.

Trump made a public statement. The appropriate thing to do is to respond in kind. Trump made it into a media event. Not to have responded in the media would have been taken by the public as consent by May to what Trump said.

@LostInParadise I find it odd that you have that response. How many times has Trump responded to lies from the media and been castigated for it? Then, when he is proven to be true, there is no apologies? He takes great heat from responding publicly to public comments. So what you are saying is that if the media spreads a lie or fake news, and Trump doesn’t respond, he is showing consent? So why get down on him when he does? Because he takes political and personal heat for speaking out, I would expect the same to hold true for other politicians, including Theresa May.

Trump lies so often that we have gotten used to it. I automatically figure that anything he says is probably false, as the statistics indicate Kindly point out one time that Trump caught the media lying. Trump’s birther statements? No. Trump now saying that the Access Hollywood tape is fake? That is just too funny.

@LostInParadise you want examples of where the media lied? Sure. You like Snopes?

https://www.snopes.com/2017/07/12/trump-lies/

I found this an interesting article as well:

https://www.ft.com/content/d6e87afe-dd6a-11e6-9d7c-be108f1c1dce

This is another example of media lies:

http://thefederalist.com/2017/02/06/16-fake-news-stories-reporters-have-run-since-trump-won/

And in each of these cases, Trump called out the fallacies of the media. Trump is a bloviating boor…no question about it. And he has exaggerated quite a few things. But some of his exaggerations are blown way out of proportion by a biased media. I went on to dig into the “lies” that Trump has told. I found this article:

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2017/06/23/opinion/trumps-lies.html

I started digging through the list. Many of the items listed had explanations like “there is no support for this claim”, but nothing that says it is actually false. If you take those out of the mix, the list becomes much shorter. I found some of their answers to be patently false. The one where Trump stated that the Obama Adminstrations policies on terrorism allowed the formation of ISIS. The NYT claims ISIS was founded in 2004. That is not true either. Many of the radicals that went on to form ISIS were a branch of Al-Qaeda in 2004. ISIS was formed after Obama armed and trained “rebels” in Syria that were actually al-Qaeda soldiers. Once they were armed and trained, that was when ISIS came into being as an organization. So now take away the lies that the media uses to call something Trump says is a lie and the list becomes even shorter. The list goes on and on.
Trump is a politician and as such, will lie and exaggerate. That’s a given. Even if you want to say he is a business executive, the same still holds true. But the problem is that the media continues to pound on citizens like you that he lies about everything and they are honest. Wake up. They NEED you to believe them. Their entire job is supposed to be reporting the truth and that is something they have fallen away from over the past 40 years or so. Now we have organizations like CNN and MSNBC that have made up stories, edited video to change the meaning, and tried passing them off to the public as truth. Yet so many of those out there cannot stand the thought that they are being lied to, so they just close their minds and press the “I Believe” button.
You want to hold politicians accountable to be honest? I’m all for that. You want to hold Trump accountable to be honest? I all for that too. But you NEED to hold the media accountable to be honest above all else.

That Snopes article is pretty thin gruel. The thing about Trump’s tweets is that they pretty much speak for themselves. Trump’s petty narcissistic personality shines through without the need for newspaper editorials.

One of the articles talks about false tweets. The only thing that you can correctly infer from a tweet is that it represents the person who wrote it. They are not reliable news sources beyond that. Trump’s tweets are important only because they are statements by the president of the U.S. and serve as a window into his dark soul. Their factual content is pretty much nil.

@seawulf575 Trump lies and exaggerates not because he is a politician but because he is Trump.

@LostInParadise So what…I hand you the proof you ask for and you can’t handle it? I have had liberals everywhere SWEAR by Snopes, yet when they come out and actually support Trump (reluctantly), it’s suddenly “thin gruel”? And what about the rest? No response? Yes, fake tweets do represent the opinion of the tweeter. But when a news agency uses those tweets as proof of something (or what they pass off as proof), it becomes a reflection on those news agencies. It shows they are willing to take mere opinion and try spinning it into fact, instead of actually digging up facts.

Most of the Snopes charges are pretty fluffy, like how Trump shook hands with someone, and most of the news sources are fringe groups.

In its conclusion, Snopes noted that: “It has to be acknowledged that since January, many of Trump’s opponents, and even lukewarm supporters, have found considerable fault with his policies and behavior, based on accurate facts. ” In other words, it is easy for fringe groups to get themselves believed by partisan readers when they have so much material to work with.

Oh @LostInParadise , let’s get the FULL story. You did the typical liberal effort of cherry picking your words to make your point. Here is the ENTIRE Snopes conclusion:
“It has to be acknowledged that since January, many of Trump’s opponents, and even lukewarm supporters, have found considerable fault with his policies and behavior, based on accurate facts. There have been many occasions when Trump himself, undistorted and unfiltered, contributed mightily to the five personas we have outlined.

Indeed, in many instances the false claims against him carry a grain of truth. The president’s plan to scrap the Community Development Block Grant was real, and could very reasonably be expected to have significant consequences across a number of services and programs, including Meals on Wheels. All this is true, but it makes it no less false and no more acceptable to claim, on this basis, that he had singled out Meals on Wheels for elimination. He had not.

In some ways, these sorts of massive exaggerations and gross distortions are even more corrosive and destructive than fake news about diarrhea on the golf course, because they bear some distant relationship with the truth.”

To be honest, in true Snopes fashion, they had a really hard time saying that all these things were false. They had to throw in provisos such as the part you cited to water it down. But in the end, the facts are the facts and the claims were false.
As for the other news sources are fringe groups? Financial Times? The New York Times? What exactly is your definition of a fringe group? Oh wait! You are going to use one of the groups that lie about Trump to prove that the media doesn’t lie about Trump! I got it.

There is nothing in the Snopes article about either the New York Times or the Financial Times. You really need to stop engaging in creative reading. The sources the article mentioned are almost all highly partisan. Even though I share their political stance, I would not take seriously anything they say.

I still think the issues are fairly petty. Whether or not Trump singled out Meals On Wheels, he still eliminated it. I do not find the distinction worth arguing over. I am not that familiar with Snopes. I hope they hold themselves to the same high standards that they hold others to.

@LostInParadise Maybe I did misread your earlier post. I thought you were saying the references I used were fringe outlets.
The claims against Trump with the Meals on Wheels is the entire issue. It is much of the issue with the claims of Fake News. Trump took an action that caused Meals on Wheels to lose a small amount of funding. He didn’t take that action specifically because he wanted to defund MoW, yet that is how the media runs wild with it. They spin it so that they can paint Trump as the rich guy that hates poor people. The actual headline of the story against Trump was “Trump Just Announced Plan To End ‘Meals On Wheels’ For Seniors”. He proposed a budget that cut out the Community Development Block Grant. That grant only provided 3% of the MoW funds. I don’t know what else it did or if it was all duplicated effort in our government. But to throw a headline out there like that shows an entire skew of facts. And if you read the article, it isn’t even close to being accurate. It would be comical, if there weren’t people that actually believed it.
As for Snopes, they are liberal-slanted most of the time. This is one of the few times they actually supported a conservative. And even in this report, you can see them trying to hedge things towards a slam on Trump, but they had to finally conclude the media was not fair to him. But no, they don’t hold themselves to the same high standards to which they hold others. There have been several challenges to their methodology for research and reporting and what their basis is for their ratings on truth and falsehood. Basically, they don’t have any of the above. They have a bunch of guys that all have liberal views, “researching” claims, often using the article being researched as a basis for their research, writing up conclusions that aren’t really supported by the facts….the whole thing is weird. They never cite references. They basically publish opinion and call it fact checking. Even their founder is under investigation for fraud. I recognize their political slant and question most of their findings. But since liberal LOVE to cite Snopes, I thought I would use it here as well.

Trump proposed cutting funding for Meals On Wheels. Some fringe groups exaggerated the effect. Moral of the story: Don’t accept at face value statements by fringe groups, but they may contain a grain of truth that is worth considering.

Trump proposed in his budget, cutting funding to the Community Development Block Grant. I don’t know his reasoning, and neither do you. The CDBG provides some funding to Meals on Wheels, about 3% of the funding they receive. It was the far-left fringe groups that changed that to Trump defunding Meals on Wheels. In fact, if you go read the article from the OCCUPY DEMOCRATS website (which I have), you will find that they fail to mention that only a small percentage of MoW funding would be lost, in fact, they failed to even mention the CDBG. They only state that Trump is trying to eliminate MoW and Food for Peace, with the inference that he hates old people and needy people. And then people like you eat it up and spew it back out like it is fact. Are you unable to recognize or unwilling to question the liberal slant to things?

I would be skeptical of anything said by a group that calls itself OCCUPY DEMOCRATS.

You would be skeptical of it, yet you are repeating it. Trump did not eliminate Meals on Wheels. He proposed a budget that cut funding to another group that provided some funding to MoW. That is my point. Some fringe group spouts off some story that is greatly exaggerated to the point of being false, and, because it goes against Trump, it is given great significance. Pretty soon even people like you, that would be suspicious of the initial group, have bought into the narrative and are repeating it.

S M H