Nearly seven in 10 Americans say President-elect Donald Trump’s use of Twitter is a bad idea, an NBC/Wall Street Journal poll reveals.
Here are the poll highlights:
69 percent agreed that his use of Twitter is bad because “in an instant, messages can have unintended major implications without careful review.”
26 percent agreed Trump’s tweeting was good because “it allows a president to directly communicate to people immediately.”
Bear in mind that this is the same poll that had Hillary Clinton winning the election in a landslide.
But even if the poll is accurate, the 26 percent are right, and the 69 percent are wrong.
If Barack Obama had used Twitter as regularly as Trump, it wouldn’t be controversial. Obama would tweet things like the need for curtailing energy consumption, raising taxes, and cherishing Islam. Media elites share these views and attitudes, and they have no problem when those attitudes are expressed in any kind of format.
The objection to Trump’s tweets does not involve method, but content. People in the government, media and academic establishment don’t like it when anyone questions their sacred cows. When Trump tweets that Meryl Streep is an overrated actress who has no basis for attacking him personally, it makes them angry. Similarly, when Trump called Rep. John Lewis a do-nothing Congressman (which he is) after Lewis called Trump an illegitimate president, it was Trump who got the criticism for name-calling, not John Lewis. That’s media bias. If Barack Obama went on Twitter and raved about Meryl Streep, you wouldn’t hear a peep from the people who word these polls in such a way as to get the answers they want. Twitter and social media are not the problem here; dissenting opinion is.
Twitter should never replace such contexts as formal speeches and reasonable press conferences as a means for a president to convey ideas to the public. But in a world where nearly everybody now uses social media to express any number of ideas, it’s a perfectly legitimate, if not necessary, means of getting ideas across.
Keep in mind that Trump’s ideas and attitudes often clash with those of the ruling establishment. If he tried to express these ideas to an overtly hostile media gang populated by the likes of CNN, MSNBC and the Huffington Post — not to mention Fox News half the time — then he’d be met with jeers and sneers, not unlike those of Hillary Clinton and her comrades during those absurd “debates” last fall. Remember that biased journalists can utilize headlines, sound bites and talking points in any way they wish. Twitter and other social media usurp this process, and it makes them feel even less important and relevant than they already are.
The last president who consistently held ideas at odds with the mainstream and establishment was Ronald Reagan. There was no Internet or social media during his time. Television was still relatively new as a political medium in the early 1980s, and Reagan effectively used television as a means of going over the heads of the establishment in the media and Congress and talking directly to the American people. That’s what Trump needs to do, as would any president who doesn’t subscribe to the hardened Democratic socialist leftist orthodoxy that currently passes as the ideal of civilized thinking.
As for Twitter messages having implications without time for a major review — this would be the fault of the listener, not the messenger. If the rulers of China or Russia read Twitter — and only Twitter — as a means for deciding matters of life or death importance, then we’ve got much bigger problems than Donald Trump using Twitter. As for ordinary citizens, if you’re too mentally lazy or disinterested in learning more about a president’s views from the extensive press releases and documents unleashed on a daily basis in this age of information, then the fault is yours, not the fact that the president uses Twitter to get the gist of his points across.
I hope Donald Trump continues to use Twitter as a means to convey views that our arrogant and biased media would never permit him to otherwise do. While I don’t always agree with Donald Trump’s statements and positions, I’d much rather read his tweets than the pretentious garbage that passes for intellectual sophistication in the Newspeak of our Imperial City.
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