Among the celebrity disasters during the final 24 hours of 2016, Mariah Carey’s bewildering performance on New Year’s Rockin’ Eve was certainly the most talked about. But a close second was this tweet from Donald Trump: “Happy New Year to all, including to my many enemies and those who have fought me and lost so badly they just don’t know what to do. Love!”
Trump is dedicated to periodically using Twitter to fire up his base, and this tweet was for them. As of Tuesday afternoon, Trump’s stick-it-to-’em had collected 345,000 “likes” and 142,000 retweets. It also elicited 82,000 replies, but plenty of those were from people who are not exactly supportive of the president-elect or his childish tweet. There were expletives involved – a lot of them.
But the base eats it up. Trump’s enemies – journalists, liberals, purveyors of political correctness – are their enemies, and the Make America Great Again (hashtag MAGA) crowd couldn’t be happier to watch a real-time, Trump-style smackdown. That is, one delivered 140 characters at a time and clumsily.
Sixteen hours later, at the stroke of midnight, Donald “Me Against the World” Trump handed over his Twitter account to Donald “Serious American President” Trump, who tweeted: “TO ALL AMERICANS- #HappyNewYear & many blessings to you all! Looking forward to a wonderful & prosperous 2017 as we work together to #MAGA.” He even appended an emoji of Old Glory to underscore his “one nation, under God” bipartisan spirit.
Only Team Trump knows which of these polar-opposite tweets came from the heart (although we have a guess), but America should get used to the dueling personalities.
On New Year’s Day, Slate posted a story headlined, “Trump doesn’t plan to ease off Twitter once he is sworn in as president.” Sean Spicer, the incoming White House press secretary, put it this way: “There’s a new sheriff in town. Absolutely you’re going to see Twitter.” Spicer went on to say that the mainstream media is “freaking out” because Trump has 45 million Twitter followers, which means he can talk to the American people directly, without “funneling” information through journalists. We bet that once the honeymoon ends, Trump will realize the problem with using Twitter as a primary method of communication. And the honeymoon will end.
Just yesterday, Trump posted this two-part tweet regarding House Republicans’ efforts late Monday night to quietly kill off the Office of Congressional Ethics: “With all that Congress has to work on, do they really have to make the weakening of the Independent Ethics Watchdog, as unfair as it . . . may be, their number one act and priority. Focus on tax reform, healthcare and so many other things of far greater importance!” Trump may have seen the effort by rank-and-file Republicans to weaken oversight of congressional corruption as a threat to his campaign catchphrase of “drain the swamp,” and so he found himself on the same side of the issue as House Democrats. When House Republicans later backed off their plan to gut the ethics office Tuesday, it must have been at least a little bittersweet for those whose love of Trump is rivaled only by their hatred of Democrats.
As Trump gets down to the unglamorous job of actually governing, attention to his Twitter account will ebb and flow. When he needs to explain to his biggest cheerleaders why he has broken this or that campaign promise or joined with the despised “elite,” the true limitations of 140 characters will become clear.
Until then, Americans will have to get used to watching Trump’s angels and demons fight it out on Twitter – as the social media crowd roars.