Trump would never break his favourite toy
The US president might be talking about restrictions on Twitter, but it won’t happen. It’s his drug of choice, and he’s addicted, writes Timothy L O’Brien.
Donald Trump was at the steering wheel as we drove through the rain together on a New Jersey highway in 2005. He had recently considered taking the stage to play a politician in the Broadway comedy La Cage aux Folles, but he had other things on his mind as he glanced at me.
‘‘I have one asset that I think nobody else has. And that’s that if somebody writes about me badly, I sort of own my own newspaper in a way. Like I went after you on the Today show,’’ he told me. ‘‘I do have the ability to fight back in the media. I can say that, ‘You, Tim, is not smart. Is a terrible guy.’ ’’
‘‘A total whack job,’’ I suggested, since he’d used that one before.
‘‘I can say that. Nobody else can,’’ Trump continued. ‘‘In other words, I’m the only guy who can fight back on an almost even plane. I mean, I’m not saying it’s an even plane because you may have an advantage. But I have an advantage, too. Because I’m on television every day.’’
He finished off with a flourish: ‘‘People don’t want to read about a negative Trump. I really believe that.’’
Remember, this was 15 years ago and Twitter hadn’t yet been invented. Neither had Instagram or Snapchat. Facebook was still a baby. But Trump already instinctively understood one of his advantages as a ubiquitous and media-soaked mogul: he had direct access to readers and viewers and could circumvent traditional news sources to get his message out, or to go into battle.
Trump’s gut sensibility about how to play the media had been honed through decades of courting and jousting that, even after a series of failures, had left him as an object of interest. That led to his public rebirth on The Apprentice and made him ready to rock and roll once social media blossomed.
Every social platform offered him the opportunity to run his own printing press and speak directly to fans and critics, but Twitter, a venue of choice for news junkies, always held a special allure. And Trump, who adores media attention while also being so singularly insecure that any form of criticism unspools him, has a love-hate relationship with Twitter.
So it came to pass that Twitter, which has long tolerated Trump’s retweeting of racists and anti-Semites while painting his targets as everything from ‘‘skanks’’ to murderers, decided last week to slap fact-checking notices on a pair of bogus Trump tweets claiming that mail-in ballots lead to voting fraud.
Trump, who has the November election front of mind and is reeling from an onslaught of criticism for repeatedly bungling his response to Covid19, would have none of that. He claimed that revenge via a federal crackdown on Twitter and other social media companies was coming.
He has since signed an executive order that reportedly will strip Twitter and other social media platforms of liability protections they enjoy from lawsuits involving the content that users post on their sites – including false or defamatory content. In other
‘‘I have one asset that I think nobody else has ... if somebody writes about me badly, I sort of own my own newspaper in a way.’’
Donald Trump on his media power in 2005
words, the kind of stuff Trump posts a lot.
While such a move might be self-defeating, it’s also not clear how serious Trump is about it. ‘‘There’s nothing I’d rather do than get rid of my whole Twitter account,’’ he said on Thursday. ‘‘But I’m able to get to, I guess,
186 million people when you add up all the different accounts . . . That’s more than the media companies have, frankly, by a lot.’’
Trump actually has about
130m followers on his primary personal social accounts (Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and Instagram) and he certainly doesn’t have more followers than all the media companies combined, but you get the point.
We’ll have to wait and see if this turns out to be only Trump rattling his sabre. He has a long history of threatening to sue critics and competitors and then not following through. (I was an exception.)
If he goes ahead this time, he and his lawyers will face daunting legal hurdles. Trump can’t force the Federal Communications Commission to change existing regulations that give social media companies latitude to restrict objectionable content. And even if the FCC acts as he wishes, it may not complete its work before the November election, because the social media companies will unleash their own attorneys to challenge any change.
The First Amendment’s broad protection for editorial discretion from government dictates applies to social media platforms. In a 2017 federal appeals court fight over net neutrality rules, none other than future Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh argued that the government cannot tell companies such as Twitter and Facebook what content to post or favour.
The mere whiff of a federal crackdown could have a chilling effect on the social platforms, it’s true, but that will happen only if the companies allow it. Some internecine squabbles have already popped up, with Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg saying Twitter made a mistake, because no social media platform should be the ‘‘arbiter of truth’’.
It’s quite possible that Zuckerberg is more worried about Facebook being regulated as a news provider rather than as a technology company, or about the added hard work that would come with adequately policing his own website. But that’s a discussion for another day.
None of this is really about free speech or proper regulation of social media, however. It’s about the president’s abuse of his power and his fixation on the politics informing the coming election. Also, his feelings are hurt. Twitter is one of Trump’s favourite toys, and although he’s momentarily bashing it in frustration, he probably won’t go so far as to break it.
Trump won’t undermine Twitter because he’s addicted to it. He revels in mainlining his thoughts into the American conversation and absorbing all the responses back into his own bloodstream. Twitter is Trump’s drug of choice, and addicts don’t break their habits so easily.