By Rich Lowry
Tuesday, January 12, 2021
Donald Trump was the president of Twitter.
What radio was to Franklin Delano Roosevelt and TV was to
Ronald Reagan, communicating 280 characters at a time on a social-media
platform that is a watchword for hyperactive inanity was to President Trump.
It is symbolically appropriate that the effective end of
his power after the siege of the U.S. Capitol has coincided with the suspension
of his Twitter account.
He may well get impeached a second time, but for now, the
punishment that really stings is Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey deciding, after
sitting down with his woke colleagues, that Trump must pay the ultimate price
for his post-election misinformation and agitation.
This judgment is as arbitrary as Dorsey’s worst critics
would expect, and it will be impossible for Twitter to enforce anything
resembling a consistent line following its Trump suspension (the platform
didn’t seem particularly exercised by all of the voices valorizing last
summer’s riots as an “uprising”).
But there’s no doubting Dorsey’s power. He has rendered
the president of the United States practically mute.
Trump remains in the Oval Office and, in theory, commands
the biggest megaphone on the planet. He could still make statements, hold press
conferences, sit down for interviews, or meet with his cabinet. In his reduced
and isolated state, though, none of these options are as appealing as letting
his thumbs do his work for him, one outlandish tweet at a time.
Now that this avenue is foreclosed to him, he’s less of a
presence, even as the political world continues to be obsessed with him (in
particular, the manner of his exit from office).
It’s not exactly a slow news environment. Yet, without
Trump’s tweets stirring the pot at all times of the day, the nation’s political
debate feels a little less fevered.
Twitter is Exhibit A for Marshall McLuhan’s axiom that
the medium is the message. There is plenty of worthy news coverage and
real-time commentary on Twitter. But that’s not where the emotional center of
gravity is, as one would expect of a platform built for instantaneous,
unfiltered reactions.
It’s this aspect of Twitter that perfectly matched the
president’s proclivities. He found a natural home in an environment that
encourages, and often rewards, snap judgments, insults, soon-to-be-forgotten
pronouncements, grotesque oversimplifications, and the spread of false or
dubious information.
Trump wasn’t careful about what he said anywhere, but he
reserved his most lurid and poisonous communications for Twitter. It was the
place easiest for him to, for instance, absurdly accuse Morning Joe host
Joe Scarborough of murder or insult the looks of his alleged paramour Stormy
Daniels.
It was a symptom of his erratic, easily distracted, and
thoughtless governing style that he used Twitter as a tool of his
administration. He warned foreign leaders, fired officials, and made
pronouncements on legislation on Twitter, often leaving allies and his own
government baffled by what was supposed the line between “just a tweet” and an
official order by the president of the United States.
Twitter was an especially ready forum for airing
conspiracy theories. Asked before the election about his giving credence to the
lunatic idea that Navy SEAL Team 6 had been assassinated, Trump shrugged and
said it was only a retweet. In the wake of his election defeat, his Twitter
feed become a nonstop source of bad information dredged up from the worst
corners of the Internet.
If Trump was the foremost offender, Twitter hasn’t done
us any favors in this period of our national life. It has fed moral panics and
enabled cancellation mobs. It has exposed journalists who once made a pretense
of objectivity as rank partisans. It has enticed once-serious people into
crowd-pleasing clownishness. It has made politicians dumber and cruder. It has
distorted political reality for people across the spectrum.
It, in short, has helped derange our politics, with the
former Tweeter-in-Chief leading the way.
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