Presidential Tweetage

Yesterday, as many days, President Trump did his share of tweets to the public about various issues on his agenda, particularly in this case the Supreme Court's favorable action on his immigration pause and Senate's tortuous consideration of a replacement bill to fix Obamacare or, as the president typically refers to it, "the disaster known as Obamacare."

Actually, in yesterday's tweet and its confinement to 140 characters, it was simply "Ocare."  But I digress.

I suppose that five or six hundred pieces back, I commented about the president's propensity to communicate via tweet, and I don't know what I thought back then.  But now I'm pretty much enjoying it.

There are lots of reasons, of course, and some are more needling than others.  For example, the whole notion of bypassing the press completely is jolly entertaining for me.  The press is his enemy, of course, for the most part (and I do mean "most"), which begs the note that when they are bypassed and the president goes straight to the public, no one is having to pay for the privilege of reading what today's message is, and the broadcast media and their advertisers, and the subscription news and their advertisers are, by definition, cheated out of the need for their services.

I couldn't be happier.  I mean, I love the First Amendment as much as the next guy, but a "free press" doesn't imply that they're the "only" press, or that their right to print in any way entails an exclusive right to print.  They are granted access to the news, not ownership of it.

But screwing with the press is just icing on the cake.

The real reason that I'm a bigger fan of President Trump's propensity to tweet has little or nothing to do with the fact that the tweets are coming from President Trump.  No, it is that they are the unadulterated, unfiltered, sometimes imperfectly-spelled and typoed actual thoughts of the President of the United States.

I mean, suppose you had access to the unfiltered thoughts of the president 4-5 times every day.  You could know what was bothering him, what he was celebrating, what he wanted to get done that day, his thoughts on his opponents.  Because that's what we are getting, and I'm getting to the point where I'm almost wishing it were mandatory that presidents were regular tweeters.

Barack Obama, bless his quiet retirement, promised the most transparent administration ever, before he gave us eight years of one of the most secretive.  I have to think that you couldn't possibly get more transparent than the Trump Administration.  As long as his tweets are accurate, you know what he's thinking a half a dozen times a day.  You think Obama was ever once honest to the American people with his thoughts?  Like maybe why he signed a directive, only in the last couple weeks of his administration, about the handling of the unmasking details of Americans referred to in FISA communications?

Tweet away, Mr. President.  I want to know what you're thinking; I want to know what's going on there and, more importantly, why.  I don't need to hear or read the press's interpretation of what they think you are thinking about what you're thinking about.  By tweeting, we know what you feel important enough to tell the world.

And that's a truly free press.

Copyright 2017 by Robert Sutton
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