Laura Packard is self-employed, working as a digital consultant and a political strategist. She’s also undergoing chemotherapy after being diagnosed with stage 4 Hodgkin's lymphoma earlier this year. Like all cancer patients and survivors and others battling disabilities and disease, she’s stressed, anxious, and angry about Republicans' repeated attempts to kill the Affordable Care Act, which she credits with saving her life right now. Her story was featured in US News:
My name is Laura Packard, and a few months ago I was a healthy person with a nagging cough. I finally went back to urgent care to get more pneumonia medication, a couple of days before a scheduled trip to New York and Washington D.C. And then I was diagnosed with stage 4 cancer.
I am self-employed (have been off and on for a decade now), and I have Obamacare as my health insurance. I'm single, so there is no fallback plan. There's no employer plan. Just me and my Obamacare exchange basic plan.
I remember the days before the Affordable Care Act; in fact the AFL-CIO sent me to Arkansas in 2009 to work on health care reform and other issues, and get it passed in the first place. I saw firsthand a lot of the insurance abuses before the health care reform law, because part of my job was working with people who had declared medical bankruptcy due to their insurance companies (or lack thereof), or people who had lost family members due to lack of insurance. I had no idea at the time that one of the lives I'd be saving with Obamacare would be my own.
Packard’s story is one of many: She was perfectly healthy, until she wasn’t.
That leads us to last night. Instead of focusing on making people’s lives better, improving health care, and stabilizing the world, the most fragile ego in the world was on Twitter, making a weak attempt to knock the Emmys and the Hollywood types he so desperately, pathetically craves attention from.
Packard shot back, calling for a Twittervention:
Looks like Donald Trump might have some daddy issues because by the time Packard woke up this morning, Trump had apparently personally blocked her.
How fragile is this man? On the upside, the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University may have a new plaintiff to add to the pile. They organization is representing constituents who have been blocked by Trump in a lawsuit. From the New York Times:
“The @realDonaldTrump account is a kind of digital town hall in which the president and his aides use the tweet function to communicate news and information to the public, and members of the public use the reply function to respond to the president and his aides and exchange views with one another,” the lawsuit said.
By blocking people from reading his tweets, or from viewing and replying to message chains based on them, Mr. Trump is violating their First Amendment rights because they expressed views he did not like, the lawsuit argued.
For what it’s worth, you can help put Packard’s story in front of Donald Trump by retweeting her story to @realDonaldTrump. He might be able to block her, but he can’t block all of us.