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Sunday 11 June 2017

Trump’s deputy press secretary tweeted pure gibberish. The world was ready.(10 Pics)

Well, this was probably inevitable:
That dispatch came Saturday morning from the official Twitter account of a deputy White House press secretary.
Anchor, traffic light. Traffic light, traffic light. Traffic light, anchor. Maps and castles, planes and boats. And almost dead center in the middle of the message: an ancient and pale stone face of Easter Island.
What does it mean? Does it mean anything? Does deputy press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders’s Twitter account speak for the White House when it says in pictures, “Shinto shrine, derelict house,” as presumably it spoke for Trump some days earlier when it quoted him: “We will buy American and we will hire American”?
Hold on; let’s get some perspective.
Did you know it was just seven years ago that President Barack Obama issued the first-ever tweet from a president of the United States? He was visiting a Red Cross disaster operation center. The tweet was written in third person and said: “President Obama and the First Lady are here visiting our disaster operation center right now.”
Yes, it was a very safe tweet. Reuters reported that someone else probably wrote it out on a Red Cross device, and the president then pushed send, and the Red Cross then confirmed that it was a real tweet from the real president, who would not get access to his own Twitter account for another five years.
And here we are today, under a new presidency, when official statements, notions, half-notions, boastsrantstyposcontradictions and legally problematic declarations run together in a never-ending tweet stream that flows from the president’s frontal lobe and all the aides and offices he controls directly down to the body politic: instant, unfiltered and often unexplained.
So — many naturally wondered Saturday at the meaning of Sanders’s “anchor, traffic light, traffic light, [etc.].”
But bafflement at a White House communication is nothing new by now.
Covfefe? The White House press secretary insisted it was not the mangled end of Trump’s malformed tweet, but rather a real word — and “a small group of people know exactly what he meant.” And who can argue with the White House about what the president meant to say?
How about “n9y25ahy7?” That one was anyone’s guess when Spicer tweeted it himself a few days into the Trump administration — an apparent follow up to “Aqenbpuu” two days earlier.

A password errantly sent into the public sphere, perhaps, some thought. Perhaps not. “Ever heard of a pocket tweet?” one of Spicer’s deputies later clarified for The Washington Post — just short of an official explanation.
And now another Spicer deputy, Sanders, has sent what looked at first glance like her own pocket tweet. Or maybe a clever message. Or who knows? In the ensuing hours of digital silence that followed Saturday’s dispatch, the world was left to wonder.
And then, as does not always happen in such cases, an answer appeared:
Ah, so if the tweet has any meaning, it lies in the mind of a toddler. And that 3-year-old does not speak for Trump, or even Trump’s surrogate, his mom.
But here’s the thing about that great channel of communication that Trump opened between his White House and the world: It runs both ways.
So when a cryptic pictogram is sent into the world without apparent meaning, the world is apt to assign its own significance, and send the message right back to the White House.



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