187 Tweets Later
Oh how I miss the days spent counting Obama’s golf outings. In contrast, today’s constant monitoring of the presidential twitter feed, waiting for the modern equivalent of the shot heard round the world, is like a flashback to being a lowly pledge in a fraternity basement with an overzealous “brother” holding a bottle of vomit-inducing McCormick’s vodka over your funnel-filled mouth.
The counting hasn’t stopped mind you. Rather, the categories have simply increased. Instead of limiting the record keeping to golf outings, Trump trackers are logging his trips to the green, travel expenditures, tweets and human rights violations.
Golf
Trump aides have been trying to answer for the President’s hypocritical golf habit since his course-hopping outing with Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe. Even worse, aides tried to pass off his outing this weekend as merely a few holes, but comments from Rory Mcllroy suggest the President actually played another full round. Why the President ever thought a round with a golfer ranked third in the world was going to remain a secret is beyond me. It does make evident however, that the President is ready and willing to lie about anything regardless of how menial it seems.
Tweets
A quick analysis of Trump’s twitter activity from data collected by twittercounter.com reveals he tweeted at a clip of 6.03 tweets per day (TPD) over his first full month in office . The number is impressive, outnumbering even established Twitter greats like Kim Kardashian West (3.4 TPD) and Katy Perry (5.8 TPD). Despite his valiant efforts, though, he couldn’t keep up with the loudest man in America, Kevin Hart — who tweeted at a rate of 6.7 TPD over the same period, a commendable feat for both men until you remember that one of the two can trigger global unrest and market instability in as little as 140 characters.
I won’t make this a discussion about followers for fear of damaging the president’s deeply fragile ego, but in case you were wondering, Barrack Obama has 84.9 million followers. You can connect the dots from there.
When talking about the President’s twitter usage, it’s important not to discount the weight of a single tweet from the President. Public discourse, which when properly directed is the most powerful tool in a president’s arsenal, has been impacted tremendously by the first president to take to Twitter religiously.
A simple comment about what he perceived as a lack of terror coverage by the media followed up by an accompanying tweet was the topic of water cooler chatter and media coverage alike for an entire week. It might have been the administration’s most successful implementation of the strategy so far. Coming just over a week after the initial “Muslim ban”, it invigorated his supporters while sending detractors scrambling for contradictory evidence. In the end, it was just another example of Trump pushing the concerned citizens and the media farther onto their heels while he mounted yet another offensive move.
As long as he keeps the public in a reactionary state, he holds the power.
*TPD numbers calculated through Feb. 20
Travel
Trump’s travel expenditures have already reached jaw-dropping levels according to a recent Washington Post report, and we are barely one month into his presidency. The report estimates that three recent trips to the Winter White House have cost upwards of $10 million. Combine this with reports that Eric Trump’s business trip to Uruguay cost taxpayers nearly $100,000 and the fact that the military plans to spend $1.5 million annually to rent space in trump tower — an arrangement that Trump benefits from financially — and you have a president that is set to cost taxpayers a record amount of money.
His critique of Obama’s golfing schedule is what it is. Countless complained about the same thing. But no matter your perspective on the right of a president to hit course, most are in general agreement that if the job gets done the job gets done. And the job did get done under Obama.
Travel expenditures are another story entirely. These are concrete costs being footed by taxpayers while the President personally benefits from peripheral revenue being brought in by his real estate holdings. As Breitbart pointed out themselves, President Obama cost taxpayers $96 million over 8 years, which pales in comparison to Trump’s $10 million over one month.
Human Rights
It would be naive to say that Obama’s record on human rights was flawless, but his shortcomings often came at a price to those abroad not constituents here at home. That’s not an excuse, but it is a difference between his record and Trump’s so far. Trump’s actions as president have unsettled enough people to motivate the Human Rights Law Review at Columbia University to create the “Trump Human Rights Tracker”. To date, the tracker has logged 11 entries with human rights consequences ranging from water safety to religious freedom.
The President’s golf outings and tweeting statistics matter little beyond the context that they provide, but the number of human rights concerns raised and travel expenditures incurred in just one month should make your eyebrows raise. This is a president that is set on distracting the public with incessant babbling, while he parades around on their dime, stripping their rights along the way. He needs to know we’re watching…and counting.
