Donald Trump says 'the kidney has a very special place in the heart'
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Donald Trump hosted a White House Social Media Summit on Thursday, where the controversial guest list included alt-right meme creators and a QAnon conspiracy theorist but no representatives from either Facebook or Twitter , after lavishing praise on himself as “great looking and smart”.
In the run-up to the event, the president retweeted a post by far-right columnist Katie Hopkins in praise of “Right Minded” world leaders like probable future British PM Boris Johnson, Israel’s Benjamin Netanyahu, Jair Bolsonaro of Brazil and Hungary’s Viktor Orban.
Mr Trump has meanwhile found himself the victim of online ridicule after saying that the kidney “has a very special place in the heart” after signing an executive order directing his administration to develop policies addressing kidney-related health issues among Americans.
The president capped his day off by backing down from his 2020 Census demands, instead pursuing other avenues for collecting citizenship information after the Supreme Court blocked his census efforts.
The American Community Survey, which polls 3.5 million US households every year, already includes questions about respondents’ citizenship, so it is unclear what Mr Trump has in mind.
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But Mr Trump appeared to preview his remarks at a White House social media summit, where he complained about being told: ”‘Sir, you can’t ask that question ... because the courts said you can’t.’”
Describing the situation as “the craziest thing,” he went on to contend that surveyors can ask residents how many toilets they have and, “What’s their roof made of? The only thing we can’t ask is, ‘Are you a citizen of the United States?’”
“I think we have a solution that will be very good for a lot of people,” he added.
Mr Trump had said last week that he was “very seriously” considering an executive order to try to force the citizenship question’s inclusion, despite the fact that the government has already begun the lengthy and expensive process of printing the census questionnaire without it.
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Donald Trump's social media remarks were at times chaotic, at times bizarre, and at times weirdly reflective of just how absurd some of the content creators were within his audience -
What is the US census citizenship question and when was it removed? Here's everything you need to know ahead of Trump's address at at 5pmEST (10pm UK).
Next up on Donald Trump's agenda today will be another speech at the White House, this time on citizenship and the census. He is due to start speaking any moment.
Trump is expected to back down on putting a citizenship question on the census, ABC News reported earlier today. The president is instead expected to issue an executive order to survey the American public by other means.
We're standing by for news from the White House about whether the president is going to use an executive order to insert a question about citizenship into the census.
CNN is saying Mr Trump will still issue an executive order, only it will direct the department of commerce to obtain the information about citizenship via means other than the census.
Donald Trump had set the stage perfectly for a right-wing, conspiracy-filled spectacle at the White House social media summit Thursday — until a fly flew into the building.
“How did a fly get into the White House?” the president said, swatting at the bug as it approached his face. “I don’t like flies. I don’t like flies!”
The interruption highlighted a bizarre speech designed to attack Trump’s apparent critics while providing endless media fodder, rather than address any systemic issues facing social media platforms, from the increasing spread of misinformation to foreign governments using online platforms to sway Democratic elections.
Trump vented about many of the same grievances he typically posts on Twitter, attacking the platform without any evidence over claims it is blocking him from gaining a larger following. He also hinted at a possible upcoming meeting at the White House with executives from the leading social media sites and new regulations his administration may implement online.
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