The Power of Tweet
Mark Sanford, Republican Congressman from South Carolina, lost his primary bid for another term this week. Sanford, the former Governor of South Carolina, is a well-known conservative, who has also spoken out against some of the excesses of President Trump. He is not a “never-Trumper,” the kiss of death in Republican circles, and he has baggage of his own, including his famous “ naked hike” on the Appalachian Trail that turned out to be a flight to Argentina to meet his lover. But he thought that was all behind him, until, the tweet.
Mark Sanford has been very unhelpful to me in my campaign to MAGA. He is MIA and nothing but trouble. He is better off in Argentina. I fully endorse Katie Arrington for Congress in SC, a state I love. She is tough on crime and will continue our fight to lower taxes. VOTE Katie! – @RealDonaldTrump
It was the day of the election, and President Trump weighed in with his view. It was his first entry into this campaign.
There is a famous scientific phrase, “correlation does not equal causation:” just because something happened, it doesn’t mean it caused something else to occur. Sanford had run a “lean” primary campaign, saving money for the expected tougher general election campaign in a “blue wave” environment. And Sanford’s criticisms of Trump were well known. But the Republican primary turnout was low, and Sanford lost by less than 3000 votes out of 63,000. The general consensus among “those who know” is that the tweet was the decisive factor. The message the President sent was clear: speak out about me, and I will cut you down with a tweet.
To those of my generation (the end of the baby boomers) it still is hard to comprehend the power of the tweet. We grew up with information filtered and vetted, through news sources we trusted. Twitter is twelve years old; it is hard to “wrap our head” around the impact it has. To my generation, twitter was a “kid” thing, something to send funny memes and videos, or more nefariously, a way to harass and threaten.
And it’s even harder to imagine that a seventy-two year old man who doesn’t know how to email would become a master of twitter. But here we are, and while most agree that there is a “twitter team” in the White House that runs the Trump feed, Trump’s greatest power seems to be his ability to tweet.
Abraham Lincoln was able to move the nation through his oratory. But it wasn’t only those few that actually heard the speeches that were moved. It was the reprints in the newspapers and pamphlets that spread across the nation, from the famous debates with Stephen Douglas (a house divided), to the Gettysburg Address (this hallowed ground) and the Second Inaugural (with malice towards none.)
Teddy Roosevelt believed in moving the nation through his own example. Whether he was boxing on the front lawn, dragging ambassadors on hikes through Washington, or riding in the American West; Roosevelt created his image as a role model. And he made sure the press was with him, to report his example to the world.
His cousin Franklin became the master of the new medium, the radio. He used his voice not so much in oratory (though he did say “nothing to fear but fear itself”,) but in living room conversations with America, broadcast from the fireside in the White House. In the depths of the Great Depression, Roosevelt talked to America assuring them and giving them reason to hope. And through his use of radio, and the dramatic broadcasts from the battles of World War II, Americans came to trust the voices of CBS, NBC, and ABC.
President Kennedy was the first to master the television, but it was President Reagan who used the medium to its fullest. Reagan, trained as an actor, was able to reach Americans through his speeches and press conferences, making them understand his views and actions through his folksy charm and modesty. And again, the nation got its contact with the President through the three networks, and continued to trust both him and the other news they delivered.
The Trump team has found a way to circumvent the press. They first generated attacks on the mainstream media (MSM is the derogatory shorthand) aided by the long running feud between Fox News and the rest of the industry. They “softened the ground,” chanting the “fake news” mantra over and over, backed up by the alt-right internet and Fox News personalities. “Don’t trust the MSM,” they said, “they are the same liberal ‘nattering nabobs of negativism’ that Spiro Agnew declaimed in 1970.”
Then they set out their own facts, directly to the public, on Twitter. The President, much as FDR did in the 1930’s, spoke directly to the people, this time in one-hundred and forty characters (later doubled.) And while Twitter didn’t have the penetration of radio or television, it still became the preferred means of talking to Trump’s nation. It is their “news,” now not just from the President, but from everyone around him. And since “the nation” no longer trusts “fake news,” then what comes out on Twitter is just as likely to be considered true.
Trump has mastered the power of tweet. It has allowed him to try to create his own universe of fact, whether we are safe from North Korean nuclear attack, or in a trade deficit with Canada. And as the whole nation approaches the crisis of the Mueller results, it will be a real battle: the power of the tweet, versus the power of Mueller’s findings. The results of that conflict may well determine the future of America.
