A majority of Americans—59 percent—want Donald Trump to stop tweeting and close his Twitter account now that he’s been elected president. This is advice Trump is likely to ignore, and should.
For Trump, tweets are a way to fight back against the media and the political class. He uses Twitter to reach his nearly 16 million followers, plus another
10 million or so through retweets, without his words being filtered or distorted. And the press has to follow his tweets because they often make news.
On Twitter, Trump is a combination of Richard Nixon and Spiro Agnew, cunning and pungent. Many politicians have tried, but none have used tweets more effectively than Trump. President Obama also tweets, but his read like they were written by a cautious staffer and edited by a committee.
Tweets aren’t the only weapon in Trump’s defensive arsenal, but they are an important one. After he was denounced at the Democratic convention by the Muslim father of an Army captain killed in Iraq, Trump tweeted in his own defense. He had a “right to respond,” he argued. He usually wins tweet wars, but not this one.
Giving up tweets would amount to unilateral disarmament as his adversaries assail him as no president-elect ever has been. Trump may not be “besieged” for the next four years, as Pat Buchanan predicts, but Trump will be under attack for the foreseeable future by journalists, Democrats, the left, protesters, the professoriate, and the entertainment mafia.
During the campaign, the press invoked the notion of “false equivalence” between Trump and Hillary Clinton to justify a singular crusade against Trump. The rationale: Trump is uniquely unqualified to be president and also crude and irrational. Clinton got a pass.
With the campaign over, nothing has changed. The elite media, print and broadcast, are still committed to castigating Trump. The traditional honeymoon for a president-elect doesn’t exist in his case. He is treated as an unsavory interloper.
On the day last week when Trump visited the offices of the New York Times, the paper featured two front-page stories critical of him, two anti-Trump columns, and a third referring to him as “cruel, vulgar and misogynistic.”
Then there was the lead editorial under the headline “Mr. Trump Rages, at the Wrong Target.” It began:
What tide was the Times referring to? Heaven only knows. The editorial complained that “white supremacists” are “getting a hearing in mainstream political discourse.” That’s true. But that’s a decision made by the editors of the New York Times, among others. The media cover their events to discredit Trump by falsely linking him to them.
Some but not all Democrats have echoed the hate and bigotry message. Congressman Tim Ryan of Ohio is running to oust Nancy Pelosi as Democratic leader in the House. In a press release, he said Trump has appointed “open racists, xenophobes, and misogynists” to his administration.
“Let me be clear,” Ryan said in the release. “Jeff Sessions, Michael Flynn, and Steve Bannon will never be welcomed in my office if I am elected Minority Leader, and I will fight every day to prevent the Trump Administration’s destructive ideas from tearing our country further apart.” Ryan seems to assume this pitch will appeal to House Democrats.
He said Sessions, Trump’s appointee for attorney general, is a racist and Flynn, the pick for national security adviser, “an ardent Islamophobe.” As for Bannon, his ex-wife had “sworn during testimony that he refused to allow their children to go to school with Jews.”
Democrats and the press cite comments by people loosely connected to the Trump transition as evidence of his bad intentions. One mentioned a registry to keep track of visitors from countries with active terrorist threats. This would be a “Muslim registry,” Democrats claimed. Except it wouldn’t be. The reference was to a post-9/11 program of the George W. Bush administration to keep tabs on individuals from countries with ties to terrorism, which turned out to be mostly Muslim-majority countries. It was killed by President Obama.
And a spokesman for a pro-Trump super-PAC had mentioned the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II. This prompted a letter by Star Trek actor George Takei, who said internment was cited as a “model.” It wasn’t. The spokesman said internment shouldn’t be repeated. That didn’t stop Takei. “I was outraged,” he wrote, “because I remember the tears streaming down my mother’s face as we were torn away from our home.”
Trump didn’t respond to Takei, but he did to the cast of Hamilton after it lectured Vice President-elect Mike Pence as he departed from a performance of the show. Their statement was condescending and insulting, but Pence said he wasn’t offended, though he was booed.
Trump was offended, and he tweeted for two days on the matter. He demanded an apology (which he didn’t get). Damon Linker of the Week wrote that Trump’s tweets “distracted media attention from two potentially radioactive stories—his far-right Cabinet nominees and his $25 million settlement in the Trump University lawsuit.” It also “ensured maximal, extended coverage of Pence’s treatment.”
Best of all, from Trump’s standpoint, it provoked “a freak-out among liberals.” This will inspire them to “engage in actions that inspire the next round of indignant Trump tweets,” Linker predicted. And Trump will win the battle of tweets once more.
Fred Barnes is an executive editor at The Weekly Standard.
