0 Members and 1 Guest are viewing this topic.
Lots of people want President Donald Trump to stop tweeting. Mitch McConnell wants him to stop tweeting. Carly Fiorina wants him to stop tweeting. Lindsey Graham and Susan Collins and other Republican members of Congress and some Democrats in Congress and Jeb Bush and many of Trump’s advisers and attorneys and even some of his supporters (although not all of his supporters) want him to stop tweeting. His wife wants him to stop. A majority of business leaders want him to stop, and a majority of millennials, and a majority of voters, period. His tweeting, they all believe, is unseemly and incendiary, legally risky and chaotic, undiplomatic, demoralizing, destructive, and distracting, too—for everybody, but especially for Trump.The people, though, who want Trump to keep tweeting are the people who rely on his words to do their jobs—reporters, biographers, political scientists and strategists, and presidential historians. They often are appalled by the content of the tweets, just plain weary like everybody else of the volume and pace of the eruptions and deeply worried about their consequences as well—but still, they say, the more Trump tweets, the better.Trump’s Twitter timeline is the realest real-time expression of what he thinks, and how he thinks. From his brain to his phone to the world, the “unfiltered” stream of 140-character blurts makes up the written record with which Trump is most identified. “I think Twitter,” one White House official told POLITICO, “is his diary.”It is, presidential historian Robert Dallek told me, “a kind of presidential diary.”“A kind of live diary,” Princeton University political scientist Julian Zelizer said.Many modern presidents have kept a diary of some sort—that no member of the public sees until long after the author has left the Oval Office. The White House didn’t respond to four requests for comment on whether Trump is following suit, but people who know him well say it’s all but impossible to imagine him sitting down with a pen and paper in a quiet moment. “Absolutely zero chance,” one of them said. In the presumed absence, then, of a more traditional version of the form, Trump’s collected tweets comprise the closest thing to a diary this presidency will produce. And that is what makes the messages from @realDonaldTrump, almost 800 and counting since January 20, 2017, such a prize to those who care the most about lasting insight into the president and this administration. If @realDonaldTrump was to go dark, and Trump stopped tweeting to his more than 32 million followers, humans and bots alike, the loss from a historical standpoint would be acute. What else would there be to memorialize the breathtaking bluntness of the 45th president of the United States? But can the nation weather the daily injury of Trump’s epistolary eye-pokes?Diaries, presidential or otherwise, typically are private and contemplative, and Trump’s Twitter feed is on both counts aggressively the opposite. As a document, though, it’s invaluable—chronological, recurrent, instantly archived and intensely revealing. “Donald Trump doesn’t use Twitter to be reflective,” biographer Tim O’Brien said in an interview. “He uses it like a fire hose … like a battering ram. And that’s profoundly who he is.”
