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By Chris Kahn and James Oliphant | NEW YORK/WASHINGTON

NEW YORK/WASHINGTON Republicans generally agree that politicians should not enrich themselves while running the country. Yet most think it is okay for President Donald Trump to do so.

Democrats largely support the idea of government-run healthcare. But their support plummets when they learn that Trump once backed the idea.

At a time of already deep fissures among American voters on political, cultural and economic issues, Trump further polarizes the public as soon as he wades into the debate, according to the results of a Reuters/Ipsos poll. The poll suggests any effort to reach a consensus on key policy issues could be complicated simply by Trump's involvement.

The survey from Feb. 1 to March 15 of nearly 14,000 people asked respondents to consider a series of statements Trump has made on taxes, crime and the news media, among other issues. In many cases, the data showed that people will orient their opinions according to what they think of Trump.

Republicans, for example, were more likely to criticize American exceptionalism the notion that the United States holds a unique place in history - when told that Trump once said it was insulting to other countries. They were more likely to agree that the country should install more nuclear weapons, and they were more supportive of government spending for infrastructure, when they knew that Trump felt the same way.

Democrats moved in the opposite direction. They were less supportive of infrastructure spending, less critical of the judiciary and less likely to agree that urban crime was on the rise when they knew that those concerns were shared by Trump.

Im basically in disagreement with everything he says, said Howard House, 58, a Democrat from Jacksonville, Florida, who took the poll. Ive almost closed my mind to the guy.

Trump is not the first president to polarize the public. A 1995 poll by the Washington Post found that Democrats appeared to favor legislative action when they thought it was then-President Bill Clintons idea, and a 2013 survey by Hart Research Associates showed that both positive and negative attitudes about the 2010 Affordable Care Act intensified when called by its other name, Obamacare.

But previous presidents were more popular than Trump at this point, according to the Gallup polling service, and they may have been better positioned to address the public divide because of it. Gallup had Trump at a 42 percent approval rating on Tuesday. He was as low as 35 percent last week.

That leaves Trump facing a largely disapproving electorate, even as the White House signals that in the coming months it wants to pass a sweeping tax-reform package, a large infrastructure plan, and perhaps try again to supplant the Affordable Care Act.

The White House said that Trump has tried to reach out to those who did not support him during the campaign in an attempt to build political consensus.

The door to the White House has been open to a variety of people who are willing to come to the table and have honest discussions with the President about the ways we can make our country better, a White House spokeswoman wrote in an email.

THE HYPER-PARTISAN ERA OF TRUMP

Poll respondents were split into two groups. Each received nearly identical questions about statements Trump has made in recent years. One group, however, was not told the statements came from Trump.

The poll then asked if people agreed or disagreed with those statements. In a few cases, Trump made little to no impact on the answers. But most of the time the inclusion of his name changed the results.

A series of questions about conflicts of interest produced the biggest swings.

Some 33 percent of Republicans said it was okay if an official financially benefits from a government position. However, when a separate group was asked the same question with Trumps name added in, more than twice as many Republicans 70 percent said it was okay.

When interviewed afterward, some respondents said they knew they were making special exceptions for Trump.

Susie Stewart, a 73-year-old healthcare worker from Fort Worth, Texas, said it came down to trust. While most politicians should be forbidden from mixing their personal fortunes with government business, Stewart, who voted for Trump, said the president had earned the right to do so.

"He is a very intelligent man, Stewart said. Hes proved himself to be one hell of a manager. A builder. I think he has the business sense to do whats best for the country.

On the other side of the political spectrum, House, the Democrat from Florida and a Hillary Clinton supporter, said he also made an exception for Trump. But in this instance it meant that House disagreed with everything Trump supported.

If Trump said the sky was blue, Im going to go outside and check, he said.

It is impossible to say exactly what motivates people to answer a certain way in a political poll, said John Bullock, an expert in partisanship at the University of Texas at Austin.

Some respondents may have looked past the question and answered in a way that they thought would support or oppose Trump, Bullock said. But he said it was also likely that others simply have not thought deeply about the issue and are looking to Trump as a guide for how to answer.

They think of him either as a man who shares their values or someone who manifestly does not, Bullock said.

(Editing by Jason Szep and Paul Thomasch)

WASHINGTON Republicans failed on Thursday to end a Democratic bid to block a U.S. Senate confirmation vote on President Donald Trump's Supreme Court nomination but were poised to quickly resort to a rule change dubbed the "nuclear option" to allow approval of Neil Gorsuch a day later.

WASHINGTON A U.S. House of Representatives panel will meet on Thursday to consider a change to the stalled Republican healthcare bill before lawmakers leave for a two-week recess, a spokeswoman for the House Rules Committee said.

WASHINGTON In a last-ditch effort, five U.S. Senate Democrats are urging President Donald Trump to veto a resolution that would repeal a Labor Department rule designed to help cities launch retirement savings plans for low-income private-sector workers by exempting such programs from strict federal pension protection laws.

Originally posted here:
Is the sky blue? Depends on what Donald Trump says - Reuters

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Originally posted here:
Donald Trump portrait made from Lego by Belfast artist - BBC News

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Russia, Donald Trump, Tesla: Your Tuesday Briefing - New York Times

Shaking out the Internet doesnt result in tidy piles of content: some real, some fake; some human, some automated; some sincere, some trolling. The nature of the online world is baked into its name. Its a web of conflicting and conflicted stories, arguments and people that can make identifying how and why something has seized the popular attention often tricky.

Kate Starbird, a researcher at the University of Washington, first realized this directly when she was studying the online reaction to the Deepwater Horizon disaster in 2010. Analyzing a dataset of 600,000 tweets about the Gulf of Mexico oil spill, she helped put together a map of how information was shared among those close to the event and more broadly. In addition to tweets about the likely effects of the spill, she noticed an undercurrent of another type of information: misinformation about the most dire possible outcomes often coming from politically focused accounts.

There were these weird claims the ocean floor was going to collapse and there was going to be a tsunami of oil coming ashore, Starbird said when we spoke by phone last week. It was confusing. I remember people were emotionally affected and scared about this, people that lived in the area. One woman who lived in Louisiana even sent Starbird a panicked message asking if that risk was real. It wasnt, of course. But the story was shared within that community as though it might be, including by one Twitter user central to the conversation whose main focus during the spill was using it to be critical of Barack Obama.

After the 2016 election, Starbird revisited that discussion and noticed something resonant.

I went back and tracked some of these articles using the Wayback Machine and they cited Russian scientists, and they went through right-wing blogs that we might call alt-right now, Starbird said, referring to the Internet Archives tool for cataloging the history of websites. At the time, I didnt notice what was going on, but with the benefit of hindsight, you notice that this stuff was happening for a long time.

While Starbird didnt document any direct influence from Russian actors in her analysis, it would not have been the only instance of their behaving in that way. In his analysis of a Russian disinformation agency for the New York Times in 2015, journalist Adrian Chen documented an incident from 2014 in which Russians actively spread a news story about a disaster at a chemical plant in Louisiana, going so far as to create fake Web pages and news videos to add realism to the effort. Why? As Chen later explained, the intended effect was not to brainwash readers but to overwhelm social media with a flood of fake content, seeding doubt and paranoia, and destroying the possibility of using the Internet as a democratic space.

In early 2016, Starbird and her research team embarked on a different but related analysis. Over the course of the first nine months of the year, they gathered any tweet about a shooting incident in the United States, including tweets using the words shooting, shootings, gunman or gunmen and any tweets that used language indicating skepticism about the official story of an attack: hoax, false flag meaning an attack secretly launched by authorities to push a political agenda and crisis actor, a term for people theoretically playing roles in a false-flag type of attack. The team then analyzed the data, looking at how alternative narratives a nonjudgmental way of saying conspiracy theories took root and spread.

Of course, the first nine months of 2016 was a particularly interesting time to document the spread of rumors on the Internet. And, sure enough, Starbird documented an ecosystem with which many would soon become intimately familiar as the campaign of Donald Trump was bolstered by the same sort of doubt and factual relativism that Chens Russians sought to sow.

The graph below shows the result of Starbirds work. Bigger dots show domains that were mentioned more frequently in tweets her team analyzed. The size of links between them indicate how frequently the same user tweeted links to those two domains. They are colored by type: purple is mainstream media; aqua, alternative media; red, government-controlled media.

The story that image tells isnt simple to extract. For example, why, in a network of conspiracy theories, is The Washington Post so big?

One of the major shooting events Starbird documented was the attack at the Pulse nightclub in Orlando. As it turns out, The Post debunked conspiracy theories about that attack. Wed also written about a professor who was fired for claiming that the attack at Sandy Hook was a hoax. Both of those articles were resonant within that universe of people discussing whether or not shootings in 2016 were real or manufactured, for perhaps obvious reasons. And one less obvious reason: That The Post was debunking the conspiracy theories was seen by some as evidence supporting the theory. After all, the Establishment must have been spooked if The Post were going to that trouble.

As Starbird summarized that argument: Look, the mainstream media says this is untrue. This is even more evidence that it must be true.

Several sites were central to sharing and fostering the hoax theories: BeforeItsNews.com, NoDisinfo.com and VeteransToday.com. One trait she noticed among this galaxy of sites was that the same story or theory was often repurposed among multiple sites, giving readers an impression of corroboration when what was actually happening was duplication.

Also prominent is Newsbusters.org, a site run by the conservative group Media Research Center which itself is heavily funded by the Mercer family, who helped guide Trumps victory in 2016. Newsbusters stated aim is to unearth the bias of the liberal media meaning, in short, that its in the business of positioning many mainstream media outlets as fundamentally untrustworthy, making it of use to those wishing to promote alternative narratives.

Its prominent in Starbirds graph, she said, mostly thanks to another name that you may be familiar with from the 2016 election: Mike Cernovich, a prominent voice in the far-right social media community. A Cernovich tweet of a Newsbusters story about how CNN edited a statement from the victim of a shooting was used by Cernovich to suggest that mainstream narratives are often wrong.

Two Russian government-backed sites, RT.com and Sputnik, were also included in the alternate-narrative conversations. RT (formerly Russia Today) would duplicate stories from a site called 21stCenturyWire a site which was generally shared by users in Starbirds dataset who also shared stories from NoDisinfo and VeteransToday.

A node on that graph you might expect to see is Infowars, a site predicated on sharing poorly sourced theories of this nature. But Infowars, while prominent, stands apart from the main network. Thats in part because a lot of the accounts tweeting Infowars links were automated, Starbird said.

It was amplified by an army of bots, she said. Of the tweets she collected, probably 80 percent, maybe even 90 percent were accounts that sent only one tweet that I captured, it pointed to Infowars, it was usually a retweet of another account. This was evidence, she said, of a pretty unsophisticated bot.

Bots played a much bigger role in boosting another site so much so that Starbird removed it from the graph because it was so inflated. TheRealStrategy.com coordinated hundreds of accounts that tweeted content related to several different alternative narratives from these events and others, she writes in an article about her research.

These bots were much more sophisticated and looked more like actual social media users.

We think they were borrowing a set of accounts or leasing them, Starbird said, where certain accounts all of a sudden changed their profiles to become part of this botnet for a set period of time, and then they go back and later theyre tweeting about something else for somebody else. In his analysis, Chen noted that the Russian disinformation agency was also selectively loyal. While many of the users he was following had stopped tweeting by the middle of 2016, some continued, he writes, and toward the end of last year I noticed something interesting: many had begun to promote right-wing news outlets, portraying themselves as conservative voters who were, increasingly, fans of Donald Trump.

The central challenge Starbird encountered was in determining which properties are emergent and which properties are orchestrated that is, what parts of a network of conspiracy theorists is a function of natural skepticism and information-sharing and which part is bolstered by the use of automation and/or to promote a particular idea. Starbirds study, limited in scope, couldnt suss out where that boundary might lie.

Her research, though, did reveal a common theme from 2012 when she analyzed the Deepwater Horizon spill data through 2016: a group of sites focused mainly on opposition to globalist and corporate hegemony that peddled in alternative explanations for the world around them. These themes (and that strategy) have been echoed by Trump and his team.

It also demonstrated to her the extent to which these sites and this network powers an alternate arguments in American politics, bot-driven or not.

I dont know how far these ideas are echoing, she said in a telephone interview. It just became clear to me that they werent as marginal as I originally thought they were.

See more here:
The web of conspiracy theorists that was ready for Donald Trump - Washington Post