A Twitter Presidency
Senator Chuck Schumer from New York said in a press conference in January of this year, “With all due respect, America cannot afford a Twitter presidency”. This was directed at President Donald Trump regarding his habit of posting all of his thoughts onto social media. Donald Trump has been extremely active and vocal when it comes to social media before his presidency as well as during. He is without a doubt the most social media-obsessed president that The United States has had. This is in part because social media has not been much of a thing until recent years but it is also because he loves voicing his opinion personally to his large group of followers. His twitter account, in particular, has over 25,000,000 people following him.
I don’t want to compare his tweets to those from President Barack Obama, who was also active on social media during his presidency. President Obamas tweets were not at all similar to President Trumps. The majority of President Obamas tweets during his presidency informed the public on key issues that the president was focusing on at the time. For example, President Obama said on November 5, 2016, “In the weekly address, President Obama discusses what #Obamacare has done to improve health care”. Donald Trump however tweets very differently. On February 26, 2017 he tweeted, “FAKE NEWS media, which makes up stories and “sources”, is far more effective than the discredited Democrats- but they are fading fast!” There is a clear difference in the ways that our presidents run their Twitter pages, and Chuck Schumer may have a point.
The way that Donald Trump is running his twitter, although comical, may influence how Americans and the rest of the world view him. He is no longer a reality star who needs to post on Twitter to stay relevant, he is the president of The United States. This poses the question, would Donald Trump even be president if Twitter didn’t exist? He had a lot of publicity during his campaign due to his tweets and that could have had an impact on his successful campaign. However, now that he is president, there is a sense of both privacy and professionalism that may he may not be thinking of all the time. Once something is tweeted, although it can be deleted, it will forever stay in the web.
