Timothy Klausutis is right: His late wife deserves better than a president who has cynically seized on the tragic circumstances of her death at 28 and “perverted it for perceived political gain.” President Trump’s unfathomable cruelty in suggesting that then-Rep. Joe Scarborough had an affair with Lori Klausutis, an aide in his office, and murdered her almost 19 years ago, is sickening. Her husband’s anguish over what he described as the “constant barrage of falsehoods, half-truths, innuendo and conspiracy theories since the day she died” is palpable in the letter he sent last week to Twitter chief executive Jack Dorsey, imploring him to remove Trump’s tweets about his wife.
Basic human decency, a quality manifestly lacking in Trump, argues in favor of granting Klausutis’s request. Yet, while my heart aches for him and his family, I think that, on balance, deleting the tweets would be a mistake.
Twitter is both a private company and a powerful public platform. Once it assumes the role of deciding what speech by public officials is to be allowed and what is to be taken down, it has ventured onto the slipperiest of slopes. I’m not sure I want Dorsey or his team deciding what the public should and shouldn’t see from the elected president of the United States. Even this one. Continue reading.