Trump's Twitter War Room Aims Its Punches at Decorated Colonel
Mike McIntire and Nicholas Confessore
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The New York Times•November 7, 2019
Days after a decorated Army lieutenant colonel offered damaging testimony about President Donald Trump’s conduct on a July phone call with Ukraine’s leader, Trump stood on the South Lawn and issued a vague but ominous warning.
“You’ll be seeing very soon what comes out,” Trump said Saturday, referring to the officer, Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman.
Trump was not more specific. But an attack on Vindman’s character and motives was already making its way from the dark corners of Trump’s social media following to the front lines of the impeachment battle.
One day earlier, right-wing commentator Jack Posobiec had retweeted a lengthy thread by a Florida man — a fan of QAnon, a fringe conspiracy about the “deep state” — claiming to have witnessed Vindman “bash America” in a conversation with Russian officers during a joint military exercise in Germany in 2013.
That accusation was unsubstantiated and has been rejected by some of the colonel’s colleagues. Even so, Posobiec’s post was retweeted by Trump’s son and chief defender, Donald Trump Jr., driving it through conservative social media circles and onto pro-Trump websites, whose stories the younger Trump promoted to his 4 million followers.
“Anyone who’s been watching for the past three years is not at all surprised that this would be their ‘star witness,’” Donald Trump Jr. posted about Vindman, who had testified that he was concerned about the United States’ linking of military aid to Ukraine with an investigation of Trump’s political rival.
While the White House has scrambled to mount an organized response to the House impeachment inquiry — there is no consistent message from Trump’s team and little formal guidance to surrogates — Twitter has become the president’s war room. The president and his supporters, including his family, have used Twitter to frame his defense, torch his Democratic inquisitors and try to undermine public officials, like Vindman, who have testified against him.
It is hard to discern how the 6-year-old comments attributed to the officer affect the veracity of his testimony on Capitol Hill, which aligns with that of numerous other witnesses. But by questioning the colonel’s loyalties, partisans who are spreading the story uncritically to millions of Americans leave the impression he is somehow not to be believed.
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