SNL imagines if Trump could text you his tweets
The Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) sent most cell phone owners in the United States a text message last month. It wasn't a message straight from President Trump, but it was a test of the agency's "presidential alert" system for national emergencies.
Saturday Night Live imagined how that could go wrong — very wrong. "Puerto Rico is fine now! I guess the paper towels worked!" reads one message SNL's Trump texts out. "Warning: White men are under attack," declares another.
Fortunately, in real life, the texting system will not be an extension of Trump's Twitter feed. While "FEMA is under control of the executive branch (the head of FEMA is selected by the president, and reports to the Department of Homeland Security)," New York magazine explains, "the agency would have a vested interest in not seeing their alert system bent toward, uh, non-emergency ends."
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Bonnie Kristian was a deputy editor and acting editor-in-chief of TheWeek.com. She is a columnist at Christianity Today and author of Untrustworthy: The Knowledge Crisis Breaking Our Brains, Polluting Our Politics, and Corrupting Christian Community (forthcoming 2022) and A Flexible Faith: Rethinking What It Means to Follow Jesus Today (2018). Her writing has also appeared at Time Magazine, CNN, USA Today, Newsweek, the Los Angeles Times, and The American Conservative, among other outlets.
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