What Trump can learn from Shonda Rhimes about how to tweet the Comey hearing

President Trump may be convinced that “The FAKE MSM is working so hard trying to get me not to use Social Media. They hate that I can get the honest and unfiltered message out.” As usual, that’s wrong on a couple of levels: It’s not so much that those of us in the press are scared that Trump will supplant us as we worry that the cost in global upheaval isn’t a price worth paying for a candid look inside Trump’s brain. And though I think he’s unlikely to listen to advice from the“Fake News of … washpost,” I do have a suggestion for Trump. If he decides to tweet his responses to former FBI director James Comey’s congressional testimony in real time Thursday, he should learn from the master of using Twitter to comment on live TV, a woman he could not have less in common with: Shonda Rhimes.

If Trump tweeted himself to the presidency, Rhimes has used Twitter to build a bona fide television empire of the sort Trump could only dream of for “The Apprentice.” Kerry Washington, the star of Rhimes’s “Scandal,” has said the cast and Rhimes’s live-tweeting of the show during its first season was critical to its renewal. The opportunity to watch the people involved in making an episode comment on it live wasn’t something that viewers could replicate by streaming the show later. Tweeting through each hour of “Scandal” turned those episodes into major, multiplatform events. And by making themselves available on Twitter, the cast of the show created a special bond with the show’s fans.

Ultimately, this strategy was successful enough that it became the anchor of a whole night of ABC’s program: Dubbed #TGIT for “Thank God It’s Thursday,” the three-hour block of Rhimes’s “Grey’s Anatomy,” “Scandal” and “How to Get Away With Murder” became a social-media-fueled version of NBC’s “Must See TV” programming from the 1990s. Keeping audiences in their seats, and making sure they were intensely engaged with what they were watching, was a win for ABC, for Rhimes — who has become one of the most powerful showrunners in broadcast television — and for the advertisers who air spots during her shows.

Trump faces a more complicated calculation (if, indeed, he’s capable of weighing the risks and benefits of this approach). Unlike the people involved in “Scandal,” it’s not really in Trump’s interest to draw more attention to the live broadcasts of Comey’s hearing. And it’s definitelynot good for Trump to do anything that makes the audience for it feel more invested in Comey as a character in this spectacle.

Instead, Trump wants to tear down his former FBI director. He can dispute Comey live if he wants to, and if it would make him feel good to do so. But live-tweeting Comey’s testimony also risks that audiences will be able to see any disparity between Trump’s and Comey’s respective self-presentation and the substance of their arguments. That’s not even to mention the fact that a rage-fueled tweetstorm from the president could ultimately end up getting cited in court decisions or investigations.

But if Trump is hell-bent on picking an online fight with Comey, he should at least follow Rhimes’s model for how to do it.

What makes her live-tweeting a treat is that Rhimes explains how she feels about the scenes she’s put on screen, what she was thinking when she wrote them, and how she feels that plot developments tie into or allude to previous developments in her fevered soap opera. Rather than merely lobbing charges of “Sad!” or “low-energy,” Trump should explain his own intentions and feelings in the interactions Comey describes. If he thinks there are facts or context that Comey doesn’t bring up, he should explain them.

To be clear, I don’t think it would be wise for Trump to do any of these things, from either a political or a legal perspective. In fact, I believe live-tweeting Comey’s testimony is a disastrous idea for the president. But who am I to tell the president what to do? If Trump is determined to conduct his presidency with all the frenetic plot twists and back-stabbing of a Shonda Rhimes drama, he should at least learn how to promote the Trump Show from the best in the business.

Can USAID defeat ISIL?

The recipients of US foreign aid have received destruction and development in a single package, writes Zakaria [Akhtar Soomro/Reuters]
by
Rafia Zakaria

@RafiaZakaria

Rafia Zakaria is an attorney and author of The Upstairs Wife: An Intimate History of Pakistan; and Veil.

Last month, as Donald Trump danced with Saudi princes and scolded European leaders, the United States Agency for Aid and Development (USAID) released its budgetary request for the 2018 fiscal year. The document, which presents an argument of sorts to American politicians for why it is necessary to commit money for international development, makes for interesting reading.

The very first argument listed by the agency is that the requested money will enable USAID to "help defeat ISIS and other terrorist organizations, threats and networks". In the short explanation appended, USAID claims that the $2.5bn being requested will permit the agency to "target the root causes of violent extremism, rebuild economic opportunities and good governance

It all sounds very good and admittedly it feels harsh to berate the well-intentioned bureaucrats at USAID for their attempt to tie their budgetary requests to what the Trump administration has decided will be its number one goal. What sounds good in intention, however, is rarely good in actuality. So it is with this latest claim, one that belies all existing evidence that pairing bombings with development agendas is wasteful at best and a decrepit example of neo-imperialist deception at worst.

Bombing one corner of a country while doling out development dollars in other parts not only fails to accomplish development goals, it taints development programmes. Women's education, childhood vaccination, even better roads become associated with selling out and caving in, goodies paid for in the lives of dead fellow citizens.
Nullifying development goals

Examples of this dynamic abound in countries such as Iraq and Afghanistan, the largest recipients of US development aid. In Afghanistan, the site of USAID's last attempt to defeat terror with development, millions of dollars were wasted when USAID went to war with the Taliban.

In 2015, the agency implemented the Rural Stabilization Programs, aimed at helping the Afghan Government to reach into "unstable" areas and build local governance capacity. "Unstable" here referred to, among other things, areas where there was significant Taliban activity. Following implementation of the programme, an oversight agency was tasked with reviewing whether the USAID programmes had accomplished their goal.

READ MORE: How US security aid to PA sustains Israel's occupation

Their report, compiled from data from hundreds of districts, found that stability was actually lower in those villages that had received USAID support. In addition to the fact that the villages that received no aid from USAID were better off in stability, the report also found that there was actually increased support for the Taliban in the areas that had been the recipients of USAID stabilisation funds. The programme, which cost more than $300m, is scheduled to continue until February 2018.

If the language of its budgetary request is any evidence, for USAID development seems only a secondary goal, while alignment with the ISIL-crushing strategic priorities of the Trump administration is a primary one.

The results reveal the truth that most people in conflict zones already know: bombing one portion of the country and providing stabilisation funding to another not only nullifies development goals but actually helps terrorist recruitment. At the core of the issue, however, lies the central question of whether development aid can and should be an instrument of foreign policy and military goals.

Most in the United States, of administrations past and present, not only support such a marriage, they insist that it can be a harmonious one. In their view, the US is committed to a free market economy and to democracy, so it should invest development dollars in creating more societies in its own image.

The premise seems unproblematic in theory, an easy statement of purpose that may very likely be workable. In practice, however, post-9/11 development dollars disbursed by USAID have been accompanied by military interventions. The recipients have received destruction and development in a single package.

This can be seen in the headlines from the same week in which USAID released its budgetary request to Congress. On May 25, only two days after USAID released its budgetary request, a Pentagon investigation found that a US air strike that targeted a building in the Iraqi city of Mosul in March had killed over 100 civilians - the largest number killed in a single incident since 2014.

The US had initially denied that it had undertaken any strikes at all in Mosul. Nothing was said even when locals reported that nearly 200 people had been killed by the bomb. Two long months had to pass before the Pentagon admitted that the US did in fact strike the building, that the strike took place in a very crowded area of the city and that, yes, a large number of civilians, people already pummelled by the incursion of the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL, also known as ISIS), had died.

READ MORE: Trump budget - UN sounds alarm over foreign aid cuts

The news of the strike and the "accidental" killing of more than a hundred civilians is relevant to the discussion of USAID and aid in general, because it points to exactly the sort of actions the US attempts to cover up with development activity.
Aid as 'bribe'

The US sees no disconnect between bombing one portion of the country (and inevitably killing civilians) and showering aid projects on another and imagining the pain from lost lives to be thus extinguishable. Receiving populations do not buy this transactional crossing out of pain with projects; they are smart enough to assess the cost of a school or a health clinic or a road in comparison to the lives of countrymen they have lost. It is a grisly calculus and its macabre nature betrays the truth that militarised aid, aid as a function of a super-power's strategic interests, is in reality a bribe and not aid at all.

To achieve development goals, actual uplift of societies, actual improvement of governance, commitment must be to development first and accomplishment of strategic and other objectives last. As the example of USAID and the Rural Stabilization Programs in Afghanistan exposes that people, poor and desperate as they may be, know when you are trying to buy their allegiance and most won't sell it.

USAID does not agree. If the language of its budgetary request is any evidence, for USAID development seems only a secondary goal, while alignment with the ISIL-crushing strategic priorities of the Trump administration is a primary one. Facing a large budgetary cut and a re-organisation that would place it within the US Department of State rather than as an independent agency, USAID bureaucrats have decided to bow before the administration and say what is necessary to save their jobs. The loser in this equation is development itself, a goal that was already becoming marginal because of the post 9/11 militarisation of US development aid and that is now completely abandoned in the rage-filled era of Trump.

Donald Trump doesn’t have 110 million people following him on social media

During the daily press briefing at the White House on Tuesday, press secretary Sean Spicer was asked about President Trump’s tweet earlier in the day claiming that the media was trying to get him to stop tweeting. (We very much are not.)

Wasn’t it the case, Spicer was asked, that Trump often does himself more harm than good with his from-the-hip tweeting?

“The president is the most effective messenger on his agenda,” Spicer replied. “I think his use of social media — he now has a collective total of close to 110 million people across different platforms — gives him an opportunity to speak straight to the American people, which has proved to be a very, very effective tool.”

One can debate whether Trump’s Twitter feed has been terribly effective at making him successful, post-election. But one cannot debate the assertion that Trump has 110 million people following him on social media, because he doesn’t.

Trump has at least two accounts on four of the biggest social media platforms. Combined, those accounts have about 93.1 million followers. Here they are, in descending order of number of followers. (All figures are as of writing.)
@realdonaldtrump on Twitter, 31,723,753 followers
DonaldTrump on Facebook, 22,380,849 followers
@POTUS on Twitter, 18,550,517 followers
WhiteHouse on Facebook, 8,249,626 followers
realdonaldtrump on Instagram, 6,973,811 followers
whitehouse on Instagram, 3,588,304 followers
POTUS on Facebook, 1,684,255 followers
potus on Instagram, 3,877 followers

Trump’s got accounts on Snapchat, too: realdonaldtrump and whitehouse. Snapchat doesn’t release public figures about the number of followers.

Clearly, 93.1 million is a smaller number than 110 million. So where do those other 17-odd million come from? Some come from Snapchat, but generally, it’s not clear. The term “social media” is nebulous. Does YouTube count? Trump’s account there has about 109,000 followers. What about Reddit? The virulent pro-Trump community r/The_Donald claims 6 million subscribers, but that’s not social media, and that figure should be taken with a grain of salt.

But even if we manage to cobble together some number that gets close to 110 million, there are two very good reasons that Trump’s not followed by 110 million people. First, a lot of those people follow multiple accounts across those networks and, second, some followers are robots.

This latter point seized the public’s imagination last week as rumors that Trump was buying Twitter followers were rampant. (Trump saw an uptick in his follower count, but not by the millions, and there’s no indicator that anything untoward was happening.) But those rumors centered around the idea that an army of “bots” — that is, automated accounts driven by code, not people — was being created to … do something nefarious. People dutifully plugged Trump’s Twitter accounts into tools that try to estimate how many fake accounts followed Trump and determined that perhaps half of his followers fit that description.

It’s important here to interject with two other important points. First of all, “bots” play the role in the public imagination that “atomic energy” played in 1950s comic books. It’s this sort of vaguely understood thing that’s generally assumed to be bad, and the negative effects of “bots” are blown way out of proportion. Bots are our modern boogeyman, and we tend to overinflate their existence and impact. That includes those “are my followers bots?” tools, which just look at how often people have tweeted and when their accounts were created and so on, and are therefore not necessarily a good guide to how many of the accounts actually aren’t driven by humans.

That said, there are certainly thousands or millions of followers of the @realdonaldtrump account who are actually automated accounts. There are also any number of followers that are tied to businesses or tied back to the same individual. For example, I have probably a dozen Twitter accounts tied to my name, since I make little bots like @trumphop, which automatically retweets old Trump tweets. Lots of other people have multiple accounts,

Which loops us back to the first point. If you’re active on political Twitter, you probably follow both @realdonaldtrump and @POTUS. You may follow both Trump and the White House on Facebook. Trump fans almost certainly follow him on both Twitter and Facebook, and probably Instagram, too. It’s very fair to assume that at least half of the followers on Trump’s social media accounts also follow one of his other accounts — which would mean that, instead of 93.1 million people following him, the number is closer to 47 million.

But let’s be more generous than that and assume that not everyone follows him on at least two of those accounts. Let’s assume that only a third do. That would mean that about 62.3 million people follow him on social media — or about one person for every vote he got last year. And many of those people live outside the United States or are bots.

In short, Spicer’s count of how many people are tracking Trump on social media is clearly inflated. But then, this is the guy whose first day on the job was spent defending the claim that 1.5 million people attended Trump’s inauguration.

Maybe Spicer’s just bad at math.

Trump: 'The Democrats Are Destroying Health Care in This Country'

Shortly after arriving at Lunken Airport in Cincinnati on Wednesday, President Donald Trump delivered some remarks about health care, accompanied by two Ohio families whose lives were "completely upended" by ObamaCare.

"Health care is about so much more than dollars and cents," Trump said. "It's about real people."

He said that premiums are skyrocketing across the country, and the American people are paying much more for "horrendous" coverage.

"ObamaCare is dead," Trump declared, placing the blame for America's health care "nightmare" on congressional Democrats.

He noted that an ObamaCare repeal and replacement plan is currently being worked on by Senate Republicans, but they're getting no help from their Democratic colleagues.

"It's only obstruction from the Democrats," Trump said. "The Democrats are destroying health care in this country."

He said that even if they presented Democrats with the "greatest plan in the history of the world," they still would not get a single vote from them.

"It's all going to be Republicans or bust," Trump said. "And the Republicans are working very, very hard on getting a great health care plan."

Covfefe and Comey: 2 DC bars to broadcast former FBI Director's testimony with Russian vodka, FBI-themed eats

Talk about an early-bird special.

When former FBI Director James Comey appears before the Senate Intelligence Committee for this Thursday's 10 a.m. hearing, two Washington, D.C. watering-holes will be marking the occasion with FBI-themed eats, Russian vodka to wash it down and even free drinks for Presidential tweets.

According to a public event posting on Facebook, the folks at Shaw's Tavern will be opening early (9:30 a.m.) for Comey's much-anticipated testimony-- and serving up some tongue-in-cheek food and drink specials for the occasion.

TRUMP ORGANIZATION TO LAUNCH BUDGET FRIENDLY HOTEL BRAND WITH PATRIOTIC THEME

Stoli Vodka, which is distilled in Russia and blended in Latvia, will be offered for $5. And for $10, you can grab one of two FBI-themed food specials: the FBI sandwich (fried chicken breast, bacon and iceburg lettuce) or the FBI breakfast (French toast, bacon and ice cream).

"[Y]ou know you want to watch the drama unfold this Thursday," the post reads. "Grab your friends, grab a drink and let's COVFEFE!"

Online, more than 500 people have suggested they would be there for the Comey klatch, with another 3,500 Facebook users responding that they are interested in attending the event.

FOLLOW US ON FACEBOOK FOR MORE FOX LIFESTYLE NEWS

With reports suggesting that President Trump may be reacting to Comey's hearing on Twitter in real time, D.C.’s Union Pub has announced they will be “buying a round of drinks for the house every time Trump Tweets about Comey during his testimony!”

Invisible Election: Social media bots proving low-key in 2017

Automated social media accounts are proving more subtle during the 2017 General Election compared to other campaigns.

"Bots" are Twitter accounts set up to tweet automatically according to algorithms, while "botnets" are large, linked networks of bots which tweet similar messages simultaneously.

Research between Sky News and the Centre for Analysis of Social Media (CASM) uncovered previously unknown botnets tweeting during the 2017 General Election.

But the work also found very few Twitter accounts had tweeted at "super-human speeds".

High-volume tweeters - whether human or bot - also tended to espouse more left-wing messages, according to the research.

Image:Bots have had a low-key impact on the 2017 vote

Josh Smith, a researcher at CASM, told Sky News: "The botnets we picked up were tweeting the same thing at the same time - that's very stupid.

"Bots which tweet hundreds of thousands of times a day are very easy to pick up. They can be very effective at shutting down debate… but we have not seen that kind of activity in this election.

"What we're interested in is botnets that have the ability to be extremely clever in the way they behave.

"If you're trying to be a real person… you need to employ quite sophisticated tactics to convince you are indeed just concerned about [Labour leader] Jeremy Corbyn or politics in Britain."

Pinpointing who controls bots is tricky.

Philip Howard, professor of internet studies at the Oxford Internet Institute, said: "It's tough to say where the bots come from.

"We know, depending on the country, between 10 to 20% of all the social media traffic over Twitter is driven by these highly automated accounts.

"We know some of them originate in Russia, we know others originate in the US, and there's plenty of home-grown bots here in the UK."

Image:Coordinated human accounts and small-scale bots boosted Marine Le Pen

The low-key impact of bots during the 2017 General Election contrasts with a less subtle, more sledge-hammer approach seen in other countries.

In 2014, the Mexican government used around 75,000 automatic accounts to tweet spam material and drown hashtags used to organise protests with a huge volume of useless posts.

And when Russian opposition politician Boris Nemtsov was assassinated in 2015, fake stories began circulating that his killers were Ukrainian.

Those messages were supercharged by 2,900 bots all tweeting the same messages.

Mr Howard said: "We call it computational propaganda.

"It's the combination for a computer programme which gets a message out to thousands and thousands of users with some junk news or some fake facts that have been made up that try to poison conversations."

But less obvious bots may be more effective. During the recent French presidential elections, coordinated human accounts - combined with small-scale bots - helped boost the National Front's social media impact.

Mr Smith told Sky News: "One of our worries is what is being called automated activity is quite often just people who are excited about a cause.

"And this has especially been true for [Donald] Trump and [Marine] Le Pen - it's the side of people who think they have something to gain in an election, on the cusp of historic victory."

They were detained while investigating brand Ivanka. Now China claims they stole commercial secrets.

Two days after the State Department called for the release of three activists detained while investigating working conditions at factories that make shoes for Ivanka Trump, Chinese authorities appear not to be backing off the case.

Reports published Wednesday morning by the Communist Party-controlled press claimed the three men, Su Heng, Li Zhao and Hua Haifeng, are being investigated for selling commercial secrets to unnamed foreign organizations.

[Activists investigating Ivanka Trump brands in China arrested, missing]

A detailed report in the Paper, a website controlled by the Shanghai city government, claimed the men took jobs at factories and then used “hidden camera watches” and other devices to gather information and send it abroad.

The account included a picture of evidence reportedly seized by police: two watches, some thumb drives, a battery and a cellphone. It also said the men had confessed. The men are in detention and have yet to be formally charged.

The use of the party-controlled press to build a public case against activists will renew concern about how China treats human rights campaigners and uses its courts. The back and forth between Beijing and Washington could also complicate U.S.-China ties under President Trump.