President Donald Trump seemingly divulged a GOP lawmaker’s personal contact information while going after them in a social media post, and according to an MS NOW panel, this sort of “unhinged” behavior is the result of the “weird, unpredictable” obsessions of men like him.
In a series of Saturday posts to Truth Social, Trump singled out Arkansas Sen. Tom Cotton for “holding up” the Sunshine Protection Act, a bill before Congress that would permanently implement Daylight Saving Time and end the practice of changing the time twice a year. Trump has put significant pressure on the GOP to get the bill passed, and despite past efforts to make the change having gone poorly, the idea remains nominally popular with most Americans.
In the process of calling out Cotton, Trump included what seemed to be his real cell phone numbers while urging Arkansas residents to contact him about the bill.
“To the Great People of Arkansas, please let your Senator know it would be a GREAT Bipartisan WIN for the United States Senate, and for America, itself. Call Tom on his cellphone… and let him know,” Trump’s post read.
During the Saturday afternoon broadcast of MS NOW’s The Assignment, host Antonia Hylton pressed a panel of guests about the incident. Political comedian Jason Selvig noted that Trump similarly doxxed the late former Sen. Lindsey Graham in 2015, while journalist Paola Ramos noted that, also in 2015, he did the same to her father, longtime Univision news anchor Jorge Ramos, forcing him to get a new phone.
“Is this an unhinged thing to do? Yes, it is,” Selvig said. “This, like, one of your Republicans that you want working for you while you’re the president of the United States, is this going to help? I don’t think that’s going to help.”
The panel further noted that one of Trump’s rationales for permanent Daylight Saving Time would be its benefit to golfers, with Hylton noting that “it always comes back to him.” Author and New Yorker writer Jelani Cobb explained how this sort of dynamic, where policy decisions are driven by personal obsessions, is common among authoritarian-styled leaders.
“I have to add one thing here, which is that it has been my observation that the more autocratic a leader is, the more idiosyncratic their fixations become,” Cobb said. “I mean, we all remember [Libyan Dictator Muammar] Gaddafi and his obsession with Condoleezza Rice. It’s just like these weird kinds of things that pop up, and it’s like, wait, what? What is this about? This is the thing, like populists with the silver standard of the 19th century, they always have these things that are kind of weird, unpredictable, and they get really worked up into a lather about them. And so now he’s like, we want to get rid of daylight saving time, and we’re going to get it on the agenda to do this. And if you don’t, you’re going to need a new cell phone.”
Author and journalist Bradley Onishi added: “Well, look, this is a guy who thinks there’s no accountability. So if you know, whether you’re a Silicon Valley billionaire or you’re an autocrat, once the guardrails come off and there’s no one to hold you to account, you dig into these idiosyncrasies, idiosyncratic interests, obsessions, rather than talking about affordability, gas prices, rather than talking about how he’s going to stop the war in Iran. We have a situation where it’s time to dox the Arkansas senator so we can make sure golfers have more sunlight.”