With Acosta in crosshairs, Trump unleashes tweet barrage at everything else he can think of

On the morning after his labor secretary gave a poorly reviewed explanation of the sweetheart deal struck with child sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein in Miami 11 years ago — which was immediately disputed by Florida state officials — President Trump began a multi-tweet rant on a host of unrelated subjects that seemed intended to shift attention away from the controversy.

Trump began his morning at 6:48 a.m. ET by announcing he would hold a Rose Garden news conference at the conclusion of a “social media summit” with mostly right-wing figures who claim their views are censored by Twitter and Facebook. Multiple news organizations reported that he is planning to announce an executive order to add a citizenship question to the 2020 census. That would appear to defy a ruling by the Supreme Court last month that said the administration had failed to provide a good-faith justification for the change.

President Trump speaks during an event on Wednesday. (Photo: Evan Vucci/AP)
President Trump speaks during an event on Wednesday. (Photo: Evan Vucci/AP)

In his tweets, the president predicted that the news media will effectively endorse him for a second term because he’s more entertaining than Democratic alternatives, employing his usual insults to refer to former Vice President Joe Biden, Sen. Elizabeth Warren and South Bend, Ind., Mayor Pete Buttigieg.

In one, he referred to Warren as “Pocahontas” and “(1000/24th)” — which appeared to be a reference to her claims to Cherokee descent and released the results of a DNA test that indicated Native American forebears six to 10 generations back. In another, he tagged the a Twitter user with the handle @AlfredENeuman99, in an attempt to mock Buttigieg.

The president later deleted those tweets and republished the series with the correct math and no Alfred E. Neumans tagged.

Trump has referred to himself as a “stable genius” frequently, and in at least one other tweet in the past paid homage to his own “great” looks.

For the second time this week, Trump attempted to give oxygen to a controversy that barely made the local news in St. Louis Park, Minn., where the City Council voted to stop saying the Pledge of Allegiance at meetings. The president’s favorite morning news show, “Fox & Friends,” covered the story Monday.

He then relayed positive quotes about his economic policies from the Wall Street Journal and president of BET.

Trump moved on to a New York Times story about his real estate career — from May — that asserted “most Wall Street banks had stopped doing business with him.”

He pointed out, correctly, that congressional Democrats had displayed an outdated picture of migrant children at a hearing on the border crisis. The photo was taken in 2014, during President Barack Obama’s second term.

The president concluded his Twitter run, at least as of 10:12 a.m, with tweets about the social media summit; Iran; China; Mexico; and a misleading attack on Democrats and former special counsel Robert Mueller, who is set to testify before Congress next week. Mueller’s report did not find “no obstruction,” despite Trump’s repeated false claims.

Trump’s latest morning Twitterburst came a day after embattled Labor Secretary Alexander Acosta held a press conference to defend his handling of a case against Epstein when he was a federal prosecutor in Florida, which resulted in what many observers have described as a shockingly lenient sentence.

In defending the non-prosecution agreement entered into by his office, Acosta laid blame on the Palm Beach attorney’s office for not seeking to charge Epstein with crimes that would result in jail time.

But Barry Krischer, the Palm Beach County attorney in 2007, took issue with Acosta’s version of events, telling the Associated Press that Acosta “should not be allowed to rewrite history.”

“If Mr. Acosta was truly concerned with the state’s case and felt he had to rescue the matter,” Krischer said, “he would have moved forward with the 53-page indictment that his own office drafted.”

___

Read more from Yahoo News: