President has the most to lose from his tweets
President Trump’s tweets prove that the Founders were right: The president should not communicate directly with the American people.
Curiously, many who complained about President Obama’s loquacity think Trump’s tweets are just grand.
Trump is one of them. “The FAKE MSM is working so hard trying to get me not to use Social Media. They hate that I can get the honest and unfiltered message out,” he tweeted Tuesday.
Which is the problem. Direct communication with “the people” serves the interests of demagogues. It’s how they lie so effectively.
Communicating through various channels — elected representatives, the traditional (i.e. responsible) media, labor and business leaders — allows the truth to percolate via a self-correcting system of fact-checking and bias-balancing.
The Founders didn’t want the president to make direct appeals to the people. George Washington averaged three popular speeches a year; John Adams, one; James Madison, zero.
Trump’s tweets are not to be mistaken for facts. On Monday, the Associated Press reported that “President Donald Trump can’t be counted on to give accurate information to Americans when violent acts are unfolding abroad.” This sentence should have ended after “information.”
The president uses Twitter to troll private citizens, shame private enterprises, promote himself and his family, and peddle lies and conspiracy theories — mis- spelling and even inventing words in the process.
Trump and his supporters have the most to lose from his tweets. The easiest way to rebut him is to retweet his old tweets, which are a mélange of contradictory and incriminating statements. The ACLU just announced that it might use Trump’s tweets about his travel ban in its Supreme Court argument against the ban.
Trump is not a mature person. When Jonah Goldberg accused him in 2015 of “tweeting like a 14year-old girl,” the columnist was being overgenerous to Trump and insulting to 14-year-old girls. Fourteen-year-old girls, based on my experience in the 1990s, possess more self-control than Trump does.
The point of political communication in a democracy is to foster deliberation. Trump has exhibited no interest in or capacity for deliberation, which requires thinking, patience and consultation with others.
Reading Trump’s tweets is a guilty pleasure that we should feel guilty about. It does us no good apart from confirming what we already know about him — namely, that he is unstable, petty, incoherent, egocentric, emotional, impulsive, incurious, self-pitying, manipulative, vindictive and a bunch of other negative adjectives. Do we really need to see further evidence of his bad personality traits?
Trump says he wants to make America great again. I have no idea when America was last great, but I’m pretty sure it was before Trump started using Twitter. Windsor Mann is the editor of The Quotable Hitchens: From Alcohol to Zionism.