The tweet revenge of Donald Trump
The Trump modus operandi is compelling. He deliberately ignores the way things are supposed to be done. He shows up at polite society’s party and starts smashing the nice plates. It’s appalling, but ordinary people are thrilled to bits. Why should their country be tippy-toeing around China all the time? China deserves a poke in the eye!
.. The more that Mr. Trump’s manoeuvres offend the media, the more popular he gets. When he bullied Carrier to keep several hundred jobs in the United States, opinion-leaders of all stripes were dismayed. They warned that the deal could undermine the rule of law and do permanent damage to American capitalism. But working people loved it. Even Democratic voters loved it. They want him to use his power to push businesses around.
.. Mr. Trump is the perfect leader for the Twitter age. The point of Twitter is not to have rational discussions or intelligent exchanges of different points of view. The point of Twitter is to slag your enemies and retweet your friends. The point is to rally your supporters and build a following of millions by confirming their biases and giving them a constant stream of reasons to detest the other side. It’s not just one side that’s guilty of this. All sides are.
.. Whenever he feels there’s someone in the world who might not be paying attention to him, all he needs to do is tweet. The length – 140 characters – is ideally suited to his attention span and to the complexity and depth of his ideas.
.. No need for a sustained argument. The whole idea is to emote and entertain. The greatest social-media communicator of the age turns out to be a 70-year-old orange-haired guy who can’t even use a computer.