As Franklin Delano Roosevelt was to radio with his reassuring "fireside chats" during the Great Depression, as John F. Kennedy was to television with addresses to the nation in moments of crisis, so too is Donald Trump a master of his mass medium of choice.
Trump proves his mastery of it daily. Sometimes hourly.
"There's really no way to understand the administration except through the president's Twitter account," says Jameel Jaffer, director of the Knight First Amendment Center at Columbia University Law School.
The entertainment value would appear to dominate.
Trump's tweets delight those supporters who say they find him honest, funny and refreshing. By the same token, his tweets distract and dismay his detractors, alienate many of his allies and misdirect much of the media.
Yet as a substantive matter, these staccato statements cannot be ignored. They serve up invaluable insight into the workings of the president's mind, a rich resource for historians and one that journalists mine in real time — as do Trump's own aides, who scroll through his account to figure out what he is thinking.
On the other hand, Trump often declines to appeal to the better angels of our nature. The social media messages are often Hobbesian: nasty, brutish and short.
In February, Trump titled his retweet of a fan's image depicting an ancient Wolf Blitzer in blackface this way:
"The Fake News of big ratings loser CNN."
The president wrote that the Russians' efforts to disrupt the U.S. political system succeeded because of the investigations of his administration:
"They are laughing their asses off in Moscow. Get smart America!"
https://www.npr.org/2018/04/07/60013...sound-and-fury
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