Tweeting Trump: Trump is America's First Twitter President

January 18, 2018

Since our democracy was founded, American politicians have been looking for ways to directly speak to the American public without obstructing filters getting in the way.

For instance, according to Pew Research Center, a nonpartisan fact tank that informs the public about the issues, attitudes and trends shaping the world, Abraham Lincoln was the first president to make extensive use of the telegraph, which had been invented decades earlier.

Lincoln’s successor, Andrew Johnson, installed the first telegraph room in the White House.

Although Warren Harding was the first president to install a radio set in the White House, his successor, Calvin Coolidge, was the first to actually speak to the American people over the airwaves.

According to Pew Research Center, on December 6, 1923, when Coolidge delivered his State of the Union address, radio listeners in six cities (Washington, New York, St. Louis, Kansas City, Dallas and Providence) could hear him.

According to the next day’s New York Times, “groups of New Yorkers were drawn together to listen intently to the words of their President, not as embalmed text, but as living things while he was in the very act of speaking them. … No competent estimate was obtainable … of the number here who heard the message broadcast, but there was no discoverable instance of a person equipped with a receiving set who did not use it for the purpose.”

FDR was generally acknowledged as a master at communicating over the radio, using it to speak directly to the American people in his “fireside chats,” according to Pew Research Center.

But in a modern age of advanced technology and communication, has our new President taken the direct line of disclosure to the people to far?

According to Business Insider, Twitter, the lovable app about 95 percent of Americans have on their phone, wasn’t created for the purpose of sending out the next best tweet, nor for the purpose of gaining the most amount of follower due to one’s funny wit or sarcastic remarks.

Twitter was originally founded, according to Business Insider, as a podcast platform that eventually evolved into a messaging platform alongside the ever- evolving technology company machine that is Apple.

But recently, Twitter has become the platform not only just for funny tweets and news updates, but as a way for our President to communicate to the people.

“Why is this a bad thing?” one wonders.

It allows for our leader of our nation to directly communicate and chat with the people on a familiar basis, cutting out the “unreliable and always changing media,” according to Politico Magazine, a daily political online news magazine.

Fans of this new line of communication also agree, saying that allowing the President to communicate directly to the people is a perfect way for the federal government to feed information and access to the people without a middle man.

However, direct communication with the people can be dangerous, and Trump’s tweets aren’t FDR’s fireside chats.

Trump’s readiness to use Twitter makes him accessible, but at what cost?

The Founders didn’t want the president to make direct appeals to the people, and for a while presidents rarely did.

In fact, the founders of our nation didn’t want the average person involved in the federal government at all- after all, why would we have an electoral college if this wasn’t the case?

One acknowledges that times have changed significantly, however, in terms of where to draw a line on where direct communication with the people should go, President Trump blows the line away like it was written in sand.

According to the article “Stop Tweeting Mr. President,” following the recent terrorist attack in London, Trump, after talking unscrupulously about the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria, tweeted unprofessional remarks about London’s mayor.

Our President is the political representation of our nation, and to make such comments out on the internet for the whole world to see creates negative feedback not just on Trump, but the United States as a whole.

Simultaneously, Trump undermines his policies by tweeting about them.

President Trump is the first one to insist on the ability to reach a global audience directly, unfiltered by aides, using his Twitter account.

It also allows him to bypass his own aides and a civil service skeptical of many of his policies.

Thanks to Trump’s new direct line of communication, though, the new- found ability of a president making foreign policy has become reality.

And it turns out things are not better this way.

According to “Stop Tweeting Mr. President”, on the topic of race, Trump tweeted in 2014: “Sadly, because president Obama has done such a poor job as president, you won’t see another black president for generations!”

And while some of President Trump’s tweets can be humorous, our President needs to be reminded that while free speech is protected under the first amendment, he is the face of our nation not only to the American people, but to the rest of the world.

If our President is willing to speak in such a way as to insult other leaders and diplomats in public on live television, who’s to say that down the line he won’t do worse on Twitter, behind a keyboard and a screen on the internet.

Presidents have long been able to reach vast audiences by radio, television and, more recently, the Internet.

According to public affairs book The Cult of the President written by Gene Healy, an American political pundit, journalist and editor, the White House insists that the president’s tweets are “presidential statements,” the bureaucracy tries to clean up the messes as best as possible.

That just ratifies the obvious: that the president has enough power to cause problems but not enough to impose his will on the government, let alone negotiating partners.

“Ambiguity over who speaks for U.S. foreign policy and which presidential statements matter can only make it harder for other countries to ascertain what the United States will or won’t do,” according to The Cult of the President.

The Obama administration faced a years-long crisis in its diplomatic communications caused by an ambiguity over whether President Barack Obama had set a “red line” for intervention in Syria if the Assad regime used chemical weapons, according to the Washington Post.

Tellingly, that statement was informal and off-the-cuff statement, not one that had been vetted through established processes.

Its consequences, and a perceived lack of follow-through, harmed U.S. credibility in the region, according to the Washington Post.

That was about the only time such a thing happened under the cautious Obama administration, however.

The Cult of the President states that for Trump’s administration, “it’s practically a weekly ritual, and the dangers for miscommunication and misinterpretation scale accordingly”.

Trump’s use of Twitter raises the prospect of a serious abuse of power that is unpresidential and, at times, offensive to all persons- not just Americans.

The Washington Post poses the statement that “a president with 22 million followers, including the shock troops of Internet bullying, can destroy an individual’s life as surely as can targeting by the FBI or the IRS.”

But a government official should not be allowed to take the reputation or peace of any citizen without due process.

It is the president’s job to enforce laws without distinction, not to choose specific men and women for harm.