Sun Sentinel Palm Beach Edition
Trump’s Twitter falsehoods a risky distraction
WASHINGTON — Dawn had barely broken Thursday when Donald Trump once again broadcast via Twitter a provably false claim: that the Obama administration had not raised an alarm about Russian interference in the presidential election until after Hillary Clinton’s defeat.
In fact, on Oct. 7, the administration issued an official statement accusing the Russians of being behind the cyberattacks that appear to have harmed Clinton’s campaign.
“Only Russia’s seniormost officials could have authorized these activities,” the administration statement said at the time.
Nor was the issue a surprise to Trump. He had publicly called on the Russians in July to find and release Clinton’s emails. He talked in September about accusations of Russian hacking and commented on them during the fall presidential debates.
Still, he added some equivocation to his false tweet Thursday: “If Russia, or some other entity, was hacking, why did the White House wait so long to act? Why did they only complain after Hillary lost?”
In another message Thursday, Trump accused the media of working “so hard to make my move to the White House, as it pertains to my business, so complex, when actually it isn’t!”
Except it was Trump and his team who specifically had cited the complexity of his business operations when they canceled a longplanned Thursday news conference that was supposed to explain how he’d separate his government duties from his business affairs while in office.
Those tweets — along with one criticizing Vanity Fair magazine, which appeared to be retribution for a negative review of a Trump Tower restaurant — were the latest in a pattern for Trump. His communications seem aimed at keeping his supporters on the team, his opponents under fire and the rest of America distracted from larger unanswered questions about the president-elect’s plans.
It is a strategy that has helped Trump gather a band of enthusiastic supporters large enough to win the presidency — but poses the threat of further alienating those who did not side with him and with whom a more conventional president-elect might want to ingratiate himself during his pre-inaugural period.
A McClatchy-Marist poll released Thursday demonstrated both the rationale for and the risks of Trump’s tactics. Asked about Trump’s tweets, two-thirds of American voters cast them as “reckless and distracting” compared with 1 in 5 who found them “effective and informative.”
There was a sharply partisan cast to the findings, but even among Republicans, nearly 2 in 5 disapproved of his communications. More than half of those who called themselves “strong Republicans,” however, had a favorable view of Trump’s tweets.
One of the challenges for Trump will be making sure that his regular entreaties on social media don’t work against him as he seeks to build support for his goals.
In the case of the Russian hacks, for example, his repeated disavowal of the unified judgment of U.S. intelligence that Moscow was behind the hacking — as well as insults leveled at the CIA, plus his own sympathetic views toward the foreign power — could complicate his desire to win support for his secretary of state nominee, Rex Tillerson. The Exxon Mobil chief executive has close ties to President Vladimir Putin from many years of doing business in Russia.
In his Russia tweet, Trump seemed to be trying to frame concerns about Russian intervention in the election as an effort to delegitimize his victory. In fact, many of those alarmed about the matter — a group that includes Republicans — have said that there’s no indication the intervention cost Clinton the White House, and that their concern rests with the larger issue of Russian duplicity.
Trump spokesman Jason Miller hit the legitimacy theme Thursday when asked about Trump’s tweets earlier in the day.
Trump opponents have “got to realize that the election from last month is going to stand, whether it’s the recount or continued questions along this line,” he said. “We’re moving ahead and put together a successful administration that’s ready to go to work serving the American people.”
Lyn Van Swol, a University of Wisconsin communications professor who has studied political deception, said Trump in some ways fits the model of those who dissemble — they tend to be verbose, as if concocting a structure of support for their misstatements.
But Trump also uncommonly commits falsehoods to writing — via Twitter. That’s rare because it is “much more high-stakes, much more permanent,” she said. Nor does he adjust his assertions after being informed — repeatedly — that he is wrong.
Trump is not the first president to spread falsehoods. Indeed, a president to whom he has compared himself, Ronald Reagan, often repeated anecdotes that were proved to be made up. The fact that he was so infrequently punished for it contributed to the nickname “Teflon president.”
But Reagan was also far more popular as he entered the presidency than is Trump, who won a historically narrow victory despite his repeated assertions that his win was a landslide.