Vertically Challenged

Face it. Tweets are here to stay until THE NEXT BIG THING rolls around. Someone found a 140-byte buffer in cell phones and turned it into Twitter, which now sports a 280-byte message length, and more, if you shoehorn in text from an attachment. Morse code has come a long way.

We now have a president who Tweets. Incessantly. If he didn't there would probably be less news, because when he tweets, others tweet right along.  And they tweet whenever he says or does anything.

I find it amazing that two years into the presidency the Tweets of President Trump haven't been compiled into a book in time for that special stocking stuffer. Maybe it has something to do with copyright laws—who owns the Tweet? I have no idea, but I think someone is missing out on a major marketing opportunity.

President Trump isn't the only world leader who Tweets. But he is setting the record for inanities. Barely a day goes by without something being said about someone or something that is head scratching. He has a thing about pointing out attributes that have nothing to do with the subject. It is too grand a title to declare he is "a master of deflection." Master of the belittling non sequitur is more like it.

A recent example is a Tweet put out there by @saraeisen, a financial reporter for CNBC. She Tweeted a quote from a news report that claimed President Trump liked the Federal Reserve Chairman, Janet Yellen who was appointed by his predecessor, and might have renominated her, but openly questioned if she was up to the job because of her height, which WikiPedia puts at 5' 3".

Given his reservations about her height, the President appointed Jerome Powell, a figure whose height is not revealed by WikiPedia, but who obviously stands at something over 5' 10". Thus, the President is clearly equating height with ability.

Why his inner circle isn't filled with retired basketball players, say, Bill Russell, at 6' 10", is a complete mystery. Perhaps growing up in Jamaica Estates, the son of a wealthy builder, the young Donald didn't shoot any hoops in the schoolyard, so he may not even be aware of Bill, or even what basketball is.

My own guess is that The Donald is confusing Dr. Janet Yellen with another short Jewish woman, Dr. Ruth Westheimer, the talk show sex therapist who is so well known that Dr. Ruth is all the name recognition you need.

Dr. Ruth, (4' 7") with her thick German accent, has the perfect persona to excel at sex therapy. She sounds like what we imagine Sigmund Freud would sound like, and we all know that Freud associated a lot of behavior with sex and dreams.

Having a Chairman of the Federal Reserve that is a scant 8" taller than a 90-year-old radio talk show sex therapist is not the image the President wants to make in his promise to Make America Great Again (MAGA).

It is also possible that President Trump is looking for certain numbers and is inversely associating them with height.

Chairman Powell has been on board for an economy of health, with an expansion rate at 3.5 percent annualized during the third quarter, coupled with an unemployment rate that has fallen to 3.7 percent.

It is possible that President Trump doesn't believe short people can keep such important numbers low. You need someone who can press down on them from a greater height, have more leverage, than someone who is only 5' 3", as Dr. Yellen is.

If this theory holds, then think of what numbers Bill Russell might attain bearing down from a 6' 10" height.

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