Levin Report: Yes, the Trump White House Demanded Twitter Remove Chrissy Teigen’s Tweet Calling Trump a “P***y A** B*tch”

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One needn’t be an expert in psychology to understand that Donald Trump has some of the thinnest skin known to man. A prime example of this would be his apparent decision to run for president because Seth Meyers made fun of him. Another? His administration’s reaction to a celebrity calling him a “pussy ass bitch” on Twitter.

If you’re having trouble accessing this particular incident from the memories so many of us have repressed from the Trump years, a quick refresh. In September 2019, Trump, who’d not yet been banned (and unbanned) from Twitter, logged on to his favorite social media site and complained that he wasn‘t getting enough credit for a bipartisan criminal reform bill that had recently passed through Congress and been signed into law. Specifically, he wrote: “Guys like boring musician @johnlegend, and his filthy mouthed wife, are talking now about how great it is—but I didn’t see them around when we needed help getting it passed.” Chrissy Teigen is obviously the wife of John Legend, though she had not been tagged or referred to by name, which inspired her to send a tweet of her own reading, “Lol what a pussy ass bitch. tagged everyone but me. an honor, mister president.”

Anyway, life went on and we didn’t hear much about this thereafter. But on Wednesday, amid a congressional hearing about Twitter’s decision to briefly limit users’ ability to read a New York Post article about Hunter Biden’s laptop—which Republicans believe is evidence of a vast conspiracy—it suddenly popped up again.

Specifically, we learned, thanks to the testimony of Anika Collier Navaroli, a former member of Twitter’s content moderation team, that the Trump White House sprang to action upon reading Teigen’s tweet. “The White House almost immediately thereafter contacted Twitter to demand the tweet be taken down. Is that accurate?” Representative Gerry Connolly asked Navaroli. “I do remember hearing we’d received a request from the White House to make sure we evaluated this tweet, and they wanted it to come down because it was a derogatory statement directed at the president,” Collier Navaroli said.

Later, in an exchange with Representative Maxwell Frost, the full tweet was immortalized the official congressional record.

In the end, the Tweet was not taken down. But potentially even more interesting—in that it blows up the GOP claim that Democrats have Big Tech in their pocket—is what  Collier Navaroli told the House panel about another tweet that actually should have been removed but was not.

Per the Washington Post:

In one notable exchange during the hearing, Collier Navaroli…told Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) the company changed its policies to accommodate a 2019 Trump tweet directed at Ocasio-Cortez and liberal colleagues to “go back” to the “crime infested places from which they came.”

At the time, Twitter had a policy on abuse against immigrants, which included banning the phrase “go back to your country,” Collier Navaroli testified. But former Twitter executive Del Harvey overrode her recommendation to label the tweet as in violation, and Twitter later changed its guidelines to remove the phrase.

In other words, the company changed its policy to accommodate Trump’s flagrant racism. How nice for him.

Donald Trump, longtime friend of Jeffrey Epstein, suggests Ron DeSantis groomed high school girls 

While he would never come out and admit it, Donald Trump is clearly pants-pissingly terrified at the prospect of having to face off with Ron DeSantis for the GOP presidential nomination in 2024. If you want some evidence that the mere idea of competing against the Florida governor sends the ex-president frantically searching for a commode, consider all of the things Trump has done in regard to the guy over the last several months, which have included but not been limited to:

– 

– Insisting DeSantis would have never been elected governor without his endorsement

Declaring that he “sent in the FBI” to ensure DeSantis beat out his Democratic opponent

– Dubbing DeSantis “Ron DeSanctimonious”

– Claiming the governor had rewritten history regarding Florida’s early handling of COVID-19

– Threatening to reveal “things about [DeSantis] that won’t be very flattering”

– Suggesting he’d do to DeSantis what he did to Ted Cruz—meaning he might insult the guy’s wife and imply his father killed Kennedy

And while we’d never suggest that Trump is above insinuating that one of his opponents is a pedophile—the ex-president is, after all, not above anything—one might have expected him to at least wait until DeSantis had officially announced his candidacy to do so. But apparently, one would be incorrect.

On Tuesday, the 45th president shared two posts on Truth Social that included the same photo of DeSantis apparently partying with high school girls while he was working at a private school, with the image claiming to show DeSantis “grooming high school girls with alcohol as a teacher.” Adding his own commentary, Trump wrote: “No way?” and “That’s not Ron, is it? He would never do such a thing!”

Obviously, we can’t tell much of anything from this photo. But here’s how The New York Times described DeSantis’s time at the Darlington School, a private K–12 institution in Georgia that he taught at for a year, in between graduating from Yale and attending Harvard Law School:

Several students recalled that Mr. DeSantis was a frequent presence at parties with the seniors who lived in town.

“As an 18-year-old, I remember thinking, What are you doing here, dude?” one former student said. [Gates] Minis, [a 2003 graduate who lives in Colorado], said that when she was a senior, the fall after Mr. DeSantis left, she found a memo on a teacher’s desk reminding the staff that fraternizing with students was inappropriate, even after they graduated.

“‘That’s got to be about Mr. DeSantis!’ That’s what I remember everyone saying,” she said. Other students remembered at least one other teacher who had socialized with students that year.

Apart from his presence as a teacher at high school parties, DeSantis also stuck out in students’ minds for other reasons:

Danielle Pompey remembers Mr. DeSantis, a Florida native and recent Yale grad, being an outsider like her, a New Yorker with a thick accent to match. But Ms. Pompey, who is Black and was on an academic scholarship, said she felt that Mr. DeSantis treated her worse because of her race. “Mr. Ron, Mr. DeSantis, was mean to me and hostile toward me,” said Ms. Pompey, who graduated in 2003. “Not aggressively, but passively, because I was Black.”

She recalled Mr. DeSantis teaching Civil War history in a way that sounded to her like an attempt to justify slavery. “Like in history class, he was trying to play devil’s advocate that the South had good reason to fight that war, to kill other people, over owning people—Black people,” she said. “He was trying to say, ‘It’s not okay to own people, but they had property, businesses.’”

Yeah, that certainly sounds like Ron “No AP African American studies class” DeSantis. (The governor did not respond to the Times’ requests for comment.)

Anyway, back to Trump’s social media musings, which raise a number of questions, such as (1) what is he going to say about DeSantis if and when the guy actually jumps in the race, and (2) has the ex-president forgotten that he backed Roy Moore for Senate even after the guy was accused of initiating “sexual encounter[s]” with teens when he was in his 30s? Or that he was friends with Jeffrey Epstein; described Epstein as a “terrific guy” who was “a lot of fun to be with”; and reportedly served as Epstein’s wingman and vice versa? Obviously, if DeSantis did in fact do something inappropriate, none of the aforementioned things would negate that, but it’s important to remember that Trump and DeSantis are both terrible and that neither of them should be president. 

Asked about Trump’s insinuations on Wednesday, DeSantis told reporters: “I spend my time delivering results for the people of Florida and fighting against Joe Biden. That’s how I spend my time. I don’t spend my time trying to smear other Republicans.”

We’re going to give Marjorie Taylor Greene the benefit of the doubt here and assume she doesn’t know the Social Security Administration and Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services are part of the federal government…

…and add it to the long list of reasons this individual should not be allowed within 10,000 feet of the halls of power

The official name for the act depicted below is The Bringing of the Presidential Receipts™

Elsewhere!

Sarah Huckabee Sanders’s State of the Union Response Proves the GOP Has Nothing New to Offer (VF)

McCarthy excuses Republicans who heckled Biden, calls them “passionate” (The Washington Post)

When Mitt Met George (VF)

Dutch probe implicates Putin in 2014 downing of Malaysia passenger jet (The Washington Post)

Goldman Sachs CEO won rights to Whitney Houston DJ remix through bank client: report (NYP)

New Zealand police find 3.5 tons of cocaine in Pacific Ocean (AP)

A man jailed in the theft of monkeys from the Dallas zoo said he’d do it again (NPR)

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