The Sunday morning routine: newspaper, coffee, and dog walk, now includes watching the preceding night's Alec Baldwin Trump interpretation on SNL, and reading Trump's tweet about said performance. These reactions--this one written during the actual broadcast!--would be laughably thin-skinned if they weren't coming from the soon-to-be leader of the free world. What is the takeaway here? How should we, and the press, react to Trump's often incendiary, petulant, or bragging tweets?
It is important to see this kind of messaging in the context of Steve Bannon's Breitbart, the rise of fake/misleading/character assassinating news, the proliferation of blogs, social media tools, and cable channels, and the diminution of the power of a unified, traditional press. Why submit to conventional press briefings, with their messy Q and A sessions, when you can go straight to your core followers with a few thumb taps? A tweet is instant, and deliciously one-sided. Trump of course knows that each time he writes something controversial, he is able to dominate the news cycle on a topic of his choosing. Presidents' attempting to circumvent the pesky media is nothing new. FDR's fireside chats are an early example, and Kennedy's surprise victory in 1960 is attributed to his use of television to speak directly to the people. Trump's tweets, however, seem completely unvarnished, and often unhinged.
But how do we react to these tweets? Is Trump just cleverly distracting us from his odious cabinet appointments, his confusing and troubling policy positions, and his impossibly intractable business conflicts? Whether that is his intent, we may never know, and pundits are spending many hours debating the point. It is certain that the tweets are covered extensively by the media, necessarily pushing out other important stories. I think the solution lies in how we handle his outright lies. A great example of this is when Trump tweeted that "millions" of people fraudulently voted for him. Some outlets just regurgitated the tweet and reaction to it, while others took pains, even in their headlines to make it clear that Trump's claim had utterly no basis in fact. And that is the key. The story then becomes another in a long line of exposing Trump for the liar that he is. Trump's Twitter feed is an indelible record of what he says and, I increasingly believe, what he thinks. I am in the camp who believes that what we get at 3 a.m. is the unvarnished Trumpian id: a scary, scary place to peer inside, but ever necessary if we are to remain vigilant against the coming madness. Let's just hope he keeps his account active as President.
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