Decoding Trump

Trump watch: Words can kill, Thomas Friedman of The New York Times reminds us, connecting the climate of vitriolic attacks on Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, which led to his assassination, to Donald Trump’s suggestion yesterday that “Second Amendment people” could prevent a President Hillary Clinton from taking away their gun rights by shooting her.

Tech and politics: Today’s must-read is this post from David Robinson of Stack Overflow. He analyzed Donald Trump’s tweets and discovered that there are actually two Trumps on Twitter: one, very likely the candidate himself, who tweets from an Android phone and is generally angrier and more negative; and a second, likely a staffer, who tweets from an iPhone and tries to imitate Trump’s voice but tends to share more benign announcements. To wit, “When Trump wishes the Olympic team good luck, he’s tweeting from his iPhone. When he’s insulting a rival, he’s usually tweeting from an Android.” Angry Android Trump tweets the most in the morning; smooth-things-over iPhone Trump in the afternoon.

A commenter on Robinson’s post, Jon Nemargut, helpfully offers these links, if you want to separate Trump tweets by source and see for yourself. Android Trump. iPhone Trump.

Writing for the Washington Post, Bob Biersack of the Center for Responsive Politics argues that the the rise of the Internet could make campaign finance regulation less important: “If the cost of communicating with voters really is dramatically lower via the Internet and can’t be overwhelmed by big spending, then restrictions there might be less critical.  Meanwhile, as the focus shifts away from expensive broadcast media, it might matter less that a small group of wealthy individuals and institutions could financially dominate that particular medium. When big dollars from a few donors are no better than small amounts aggregated from lots of people, democracy benefits.”

From the fever swamps: Roger Stone, the longtime dirty trickster and sometime Donald Trump adviser, claims in a recent speech that he is in communication with WikiLeaks’ Julian Assange and expects his “next tranche” of documents will “pertain to the Clinton Foundation.”

Assange suggested to a Dutch TV program that 27-year-old Democratic National Committee staffer who was murdered a few weeks ago might have been a source of the committee email leak and said WikiLeaks was investigating further, Andrew Kaczynski reports for Buzzfeed.

This is civic tech: Here are 34 highlights from the first two years of the U.S. Digital Service.

What sharing economy: In the wake of Uber’s big deal in China, selling its operations to Didi Chuxing and ending up owning a part of Lyft (as well as some of its Asian rivals), Kevin Carty argues in Slate that the company is now more deserving of anti-trust scrutiny than ever before.

Future shock: A 3-D printed gun in a passenger’s carry-on bag, loaded with live ammunition, was found by security officers at the Reno-Tahoe International Airport, the TSA’s blog revealed at the end of last week.