MAKE TWEETING GREAT AGAIN
In 1829 Andrew Jackson invited the public to an Inaugural reception at the White House and his raucous, uncouth followers showed up in hordes, turning the normally dignified residence into a rowdy mob scene. To placate and remove the thousands of visitors, staffers set up washtubs full of whiskey and juice on the White House lawn. Polite east coast society, naturally, recoiled at this disruption from the frontier President.
Fast forward almost two centuries and a similar phenomenon unfolds as the political and press intelligentsia revolt against the social media disruption stirred by our Tweeter-in-Chief, President Trump. Fittingly, Trump keeps a statue of Jackson in the Oval Office today. Like Old Hickory, he’s invited the people into the sanctums of power — not literally this time, but digitally, giving everyday people, both supporters and haters, unfettered access to their President.
Predictably, the entitled elites of New York newsrooms and Washington lobbying salons resent this usurpation of the established political order. Lately even Republicans criticize Trump’s tweets. Conservative radio host Laura Ingraham warned “you’re not going to win…through the Twitter war.” Senator Lindsey Graham admonished, “every time you tweet, it makes it harder on us who are trying to help you.” Former candidate and tech executive Carly Fiorina called his tweets “very destructive.”
The President will likely not consider the advice of those two former primary rivals who, between them, earned a whopping total of one delegate to the GOP convention (Trump earned 1,543 total). Moreover, I would agree with Fiorina that he is destroying something…the established modus operandi of the mainstream media.
The sweet irony is that the very same media figures who howl at his sometimes bawdy and inelegant tweets also cannot get enough of the news he breaks as his tweets utterly dominate the daily cycle in 2017 every bit as much as they did in 2016. Trump thereby achieves two goals simultaneously. First, he frames the debate by starting the political conversation well before much of American even wakes up. Second, he bypasses an aggressively antagonistic press and speaks directly to the people.
As a veteran of the campaign and surrogate who gave hundreds of cable news interviews, most of them highly adversarial on outlets like MSNBC and CNN, I can attest to the utter, visceral disdain for Trump shared among almost all TV producers and on-air talent, save for Fox News (where I am now a contributor). Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government recently published a revealing study on this bias and determined, for example, that 96% of all mainstream media coverage of Trump on immigration topics was negative.
President Trump has endangered the importance of on-air pundits like me by communicating unfiltered to voters. The average American no longer needs “experts” to distill and interpret the plans and motives of the Administration, but rather just a free social media account. Largely through this approach, the President singularly re-wrote the rule book on campaigns, spending a fraction compared to his opponents en route to victory. His campaign, like his business career before, exemplified the spirit of entrepreneurialism, making much with little.
Today’s Andrew Jackson will continue to defy conventional wisdom and win as he pursues a growth agenda that empowers the forgotten American worker. Mr. President, I hope you ignore the advice of the chattering elites, and keep Making Tweeting Great Again.
