The Power of Tweet<\/p>\n
Mark Sanford, Republican Congressman from South Carolina, lost his primary bid for another term this week.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 He is not a \u201cnever-Trumper,\u201d the kiss of death in Republican circles, and he has baggage of his own, including his famous \u201c naked hike\u201d on the Appalachian Trail that turned out to be a flight to Argentina to meet his lover.\u00a0 But he thought that was all behind him, until, the tweet.<\/p>\n
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\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n It was the day of the election, and President Trump weighed in with his view.\u00a0 It was his first entry into this campaign.<\/p>\n There is a famous scientific phrase, \u201ccorrelation does not equal causation:\u201d just because something happened, it doesn\u2019t mean it caused something else to occur.\u00a0 Sanford had run a \u201clean\u201d primary campaign, saving money for the expected tougher general election campaign in a \u201cblue wave\u201d environment.\u00a0And Sanford\u2019s criticisms of Trump were well known.\u00a0 But the Republican primary turnout was low, and Sanford lost by less than 3000 votes out of 63,000.\u00a0 The general consensus among \u201cthose who know\u201d is that the tweet was the decisive factor.\u00a0The message the President sent was clear:\u00a0 speak out about me, and I will cut you down with a tweet.<\/p>\n To those of my generation (the end of the baby boomers) it still is hard to comprehend the power of the tweet.\u00a0 We grew up with information filtered and vetted, through news sources we trusted.\u00a0Twitter is twelve years old; it is hard to \u201cwrap our head\u201d around the impact it has.\u00a0\u00a0 To my generation, twitter was a \u201ckid\u201d thing, something to send funny memes and videos, or more nefariously, a way to harass and threaten.<\/p>\n And it\u2019s even harder to imagine that a seventy-two year old man who doesn\u2019t know how to email would become a master of twitter.\u00a0 But here we are, and while most agree that there is a \u201ctwitter team\u201d in the White House that runs the Trump feed, Trump\u2019s greatest power seems to be his ability to tweet.<\/p>\n Abraham Lincoln was able to move the nation through his oratory.\u00a0 But it wasn\u2019t only those few that actually heard the speeches that were moved.\u00a0It 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.)<\/p>\n Teddy Roosevelt believed in moving the nation through his own example.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 And he made sure the press was with him, to report his example to the world.<\/p>\n His cousin Franklin became the master of the new medium, the radio.\u00a0 He used his voice not so much in oratory (though he did say \u201cnothing to fear but fear itself\u201d,) but in living room conversations with America, broadcast from the fireside in the White House.\u00a0 In the depths of the Great Depression, Roosevelt talked to America assuring them and giving them reason to hope.\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n President Kennedy was the first to master the television, but it was President Reagan who used the medium to its fullest.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n The Trump team has found a way to circumvent the press.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 They \u201csoftened the ground,\u201d chanting the \u201cfake news\u201d mantra over and over, backed up by the alt-right internet and Fox News personalities.\u00a0 \u201cDon\u2019t trust the MSM,\u201d they said, \u201cthey are the same liberal \u2018nattering nabobs of negativism\u2019 that Spiro Agnew declaimed in 1970.\u201d<\/p>\n Then they set out their own facts, directly to the public, on Twitter.\u00a0 The President, much as FDR did in the 1930\u2019s, spoke directly to the people, this time in one-hundred and forty characters (later doubled.)\u00a0 And while Twitter didn\u2019t have the penetration of radio or television, it still became the preferred means of talking to Trump\u2019s nation.\u00a0It is their \u201cnews,\u201d now not just from the President, but from everyone around him.\u00a0 And since \u201cthe nation\u201d no longer trusts \u201cfake news,\u201d then what comes out on Twitter is just as likely to be considered true.<\/p>\n Trump has mastered the power of tweet.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 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\u2019s findings.\u00a0 The results of that conflict may well determine the future of America.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"