Donald Trump the Entertainer, an expert manipulator of media, for years used Twitter to levy shockingly personal insults at other celebrities, airing his grievances on the platform to generate breathless tabloid coverage and amplify his relevance.
Unsurprisingly, Donald Trump the President has used Twitter with unprecedented unprofessionalism, mocking Arnold Schwarzenegger over reality show ratings, lashing out at news outlets in typo-laden rants, all while presiding over the most powerful nation on the planet.
Both Trump and his detractors spend too much time obsessing over his use of the platform. Between tweets, the administration is governing and the world is spinning, so the raving over silly tweets and defenses of his right to post them, has not been proportional. But with his tweets on Thursday morning, the president may have reached a new low that deserves our attention. Yes, many have said the same about many other tweets for many months now — it’s a routine that’s starting to feel meaningless.
But if there is any line at all, even for Trump’s most ardent supporters, past which he should not be tweeting, certainly we must agree his statement on Thursday crosses it. If not, it’s time wonder whether there is a line at all.
“I heard poorly rated @Morning_Joe speaks badly of me (don’t watch anymore),” Trump tweeted at 7:52 a.m., “Then how come low I.Q. Crazy Mika, along with Psycho Joe, came….to Mar-a-Lago 3 nights in a row around New Year’s Eve, and insisted on joining me. She was bleeding badly from a face-lift. I said no!”
To recap, before 8:00 a.m. on a Thursday, the president of the United States posted on social media to call morning cable news hosts “low I.Q.,” “crazy,” and “psycho,” and mock one’s alleged recovery from a facelift. Why?
Seriously — why?
That is a task not even worthy of an average citizen’s time, let alone the leader of the free world’s. There’s punching down and then there’s punching down. Yes, the “Morning Joe” hosts have speculated about Trump’s mental health, something he is perfectly within reason to find irritating. But for someone who understands the media, and often posts bizarre tweets deliberately as a way to distract journalists, he should know that even on a good day, “Morning Joe” brings in roughly 1 million viewers and the vast majority of the country would not be able to recognize the names Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski.
His persistent fixation on the hosts of a cable news morning show watched only by hardcore political observers appears to burn so deep that it compelled him to take time away from governing the country to post an insulting tweet as mean-spirited and personal as a quip from the mouth of a middle-school bully.
The most poignant response to Trump came not from Scarborough or Brzezinski, but from NBC PR head Mark Kornblau, who posted, “Never imagined a day when I would think to myself, ‘it is beneath my dignity to respond to the President of the United States.'”
He’s right — it is beneath his dignity. And therein lies the problem.
If the president has gone so low that it is now beneath the dignity of a PR executive to respond to his tweets, how does that reflect on the office of the presidency? At what point do his words finally the cross the line? Or are we all just to accept that there is no line, waiting anxiously every day for the next four years for him to move the basement floor a foot lower until we’re so deep into the abyss that our president’s voice is too diminished to matter?
Emily Jashinsky is a commentary writer for the Washington Examiner.
