Speaking to reporters on February 18, 2020, President Donald Trump stated, âI probably wouldnât have gotten here without social media because I certainly donât get fair press.â He then added, âSocial media, for me, has been very important because it gives me a voice, because I donât get that voice in the press. In the media, I donât get that voice. So Iâm allowed to have a voice.â1
As the president reveals, Twitter provides presidents with a voice that allows them to communicate directly with the public. It also allows them to circumvent the power of the press, which since at least the days of Richard Nixon has been increasingly more negative in its coverage of U.S. presidents. While Barack Obama was the first president to tweet, Donald Trump has established a new method of presidential communication. What we call going directly public (or as we cleverly refer to it, GDP) is not merely a new means of communication, it is a major development in the accretion of presidential power. Our book therefore is not merely an examination of Trumpâs tweetsâit represents an evaluation of a new mechanism designed to advance presidential power. It also raises a serious question that concerned the Founders. Does presidential rhetoric, in this case in the form of GDP, promote democracy or does it reflect a movement toward mob rule and demagoguery?
Persistent Interests in Trumpâs Tweets
On July 14, 2019, President Donald Trump renewed his attacks against the four female Democratic lawmakers led by Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York. The president tweeted that the four liberal members of Congress should âgo back and help fix the totally broken and crime infested places from which they came.â2 Three of the lawmakers actually were born in the United States. The presidentâs tweet promoted a backlash to his ongoing Twitter fight with members of âThe Squad,â as the four representatives were known. Despite negative press, Trump not only continued his attacks, especially on Representative Ilhan Omar of Minnesota (Rupar 2019a), a Muslim originally born in Somalia, he maintained that his words were not racist (Forgey 2019a; Liptak and Collins 2019).
Still, immediate public responses to the racially charged language in Trumpâs tweets arose from across the political spectrum. For example, in unity with other Democrats (Resto-Montero 2019), Senator Elizabeth Warren condemned Trumpâs words and tweeted in response that Trumpâs tweet was â[a] racist and xenophobic attack on Democratic congresswomen. This âisâ their country, regardless of whether or not Trump realizes it.â3 Nancy Pelosi, the Speaker of the House of Representatives, responded by noting that, âwhen [Trump] tells four American Congresswomen to go back to their countries, he reaffirms his plan to âMake America Great Againâ has always been about making America white againâ (Saacks 2019). Responses from Republican members of Congress were more measured, walking a delicate balance between direct criticisms of the president and the policy sentiment therein (Everett and Arkin 2019). Senator Lindsey Graham, a strong ally of the president on Capitol Hill, noted that Trumpâs words were more narcissist than racist, criticized the policies that the Congresswomen support, and suggested that Trump âaim higherâ (Panetta 2019). Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell refused to speak directly on Trumpâs tweets, focusing instead on âcriticizing the âincendiary rhetoricâ across the ideological spectrum. He ultimately concluded that the âpresidentâs not a racistââ (Zhou 2019).
Regardless of the underlying intent of Trumpâs tweets in this case, two points seem clear. First, despite the immediate and strong condemnations of Trumpâs rhetoric (Davis 2019), there are advantages for Trump to engage in negative political attacks on Twitter. As Kim (2019) reports in a Vox article on July 17, 2019, âfollowing the uproar surrounding Trumpâs racist comments, support for the president among Republicans rose by 5 percentage points to 72 percent⊠His net approval rating dropped by 2 percent among Democrats.â In other words, Trump gained further approval from his base supporters while losing only a small degree of support (within the margin of error) from Democrats, who were unlikely to support him anyway. Second, as often is the case with Trumpâs tweets, unplanned policy announcements via Twitter resulted in confusion and a scramble to incorporate and to defend Trumpâs spontaneous outbursts. His attacks on The Squad sparked a rush by his 2020 campaign team to incorporate and âto repackage the attack on the four women of color into a broader patriotic messageâ (Orr 2019).
As another example of a controversy that mostly began on Twitter, consider also Trumpâs decision to pull U.S. troops out of Syria. U.S. involvement on the ground in Syria began in October of 2015 when President Barack Obama ordered the deployment of dozens of special operations troops into Syria to advise the locals fighting against the Islamic State (Baker et al. 2015). By the end of 2018, there were approximately 2000 U.S. troops in Syria, in mainly supporting roles to Syrian Kurdish allies fighting against ISIS. Ever critical of U.S. military involvement overseas, Trump announced abruptly on Twitter on December 19, 2018, that ISIS had been defeated, and he intended to bring the troops home.4 Then on October 6, 2019, following a phone call with Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, the White House announced that Turkey would begin military operations in the Turkey-Syria border region against the Kurds, and U.S. forces would withdraw from the northeastern Syria area (Schmitt et al. 2019). While the timing of Trumpâs decision to withdraw troops from Syria may have surprised many people, including officials serving inside his own administration, his decision to do so was not. In an off-script comment at an event in Ohio on infrastructure in March 2018, Trump commented on the state of ISIS, noting that, âWeâre knocking the hell out of ISIS. Weâll be coming out of Syria like very soon. Let the other people take care of it nowâ (quoted in Browne and Starr 2018). He tweeted on December 19, 2018, that it is time to bri...