g♣ 7-2-17 ∼ Monday morning Trump advisor Kelly Anne Conway said the media wastes time on the president’s tweets, time that might be better spent covering “finer policy points.” On Fox & Friends Conway claimed to have tested some one hundred sixty three tweets by Donald Trump back in June. She added “Three-quarters of them, at least, had to do with policy, bilateral meetings, legislation.” Like much Conway says though, her gripe and so-called tweet test were carefully spun and only served to cloud a key issue.
Ultimately, she’s wrong to rate superfluous the media time spent on Donald Trump’s largely outlandish tweets. Constant coverage of Trump’s tweets is all-important simply because the encapsulations, oft improvisational rants and riffs, engender Trump’s bizarre behavior and personality. They’re a road map to his personal knowledge, values and priorities, his loyalties, proclivities, his strengths and limitations, his political prowess and tactical maneuvering not to mention that quick bleed of his credibility worldwide.
They’re a blueprint for his mindset, emotions and character, a mosaic of his psychological makeup, of his neurological state, sensibility and temperament. The fixed, near-compulsive tweets of our newly elected leader, their iterative inaccuracy, rancor and vulgarity, their ongoing pettiness, cruelty and intolerance will always play a major role in any assimilation of Trump. They’re a source of news vital to public perception and appraisal of our newly coined and oddball commander-in-chief, news dire to public assessment of the people in orbit around him.
Is reportage of Trump’s tweets a waste of time? If there’s waste at all it’s Donald Trump’s and Donald Trump’s alone. In fact, the disturbingly frequent, shameful, petty, puerile, crude, vicious, demeaning, toxic, slanderous, disproportionate, inaccurate, inappropriate, dire, destructive, disruptive, counter-productive, self-revealing, self-indicting, self-discrediting, all but roundly self-sabotaging and generally destabilizing nature of the world leader’s Twitter log begs copious scrutiny from the press. The Fourth Estate is, after all, chief advocate for public awareness bringing to light often somewhat skewed, corrupt, dangerous and incompetent leadership. The Trump tweets have proven indispensable to coverage of the White House as we’ve lapsed into the Donald Trump era.
Sundry as the tweets are, many shame the president, shame the office of the president and the United States at large. This they do at home and all across the globe. Many tend to underscore Trump’s dubious judgment, preening vanity, impropriety and misplaced priorities. Many tend to lay bare Donald Trump’s boorishness, dishonesty, injustice and mean-spiritedness, ugly traits beneath the dignity and decorum of the United States presidency. Many more are basically indecent.
Frequently the tweets engender id-driven lashings out, gut responses, knee jerk reactions to perceived slights, makeshift diversions, thin, last-minute smoke screens, distractions from negative attention well-earned. They’re often made without self-control or circumspection, more the tantrums of a child than the measured declarations of a full-fledged and capable adult much less of a full-blown American a president.
The same tweets now comprise bona fide records, make official files, megabytes, maybe even gigabytes of damning information in a presidential archive which ought to bode shameful for Trump. Still weirdly, suspiciously, conspicuously, the man doesn’t get it. Still he carries on tweeting in his crude and reckless way, using Twitter in the same crass and slanderous tradition.
How can Trump fail to understand common decency? It’s this and other very pressing qualms about our leader which a vigilant and systematic study of his mounting tweets will surely help answer one day, will maybe help start his criminal prosecution, make his mental or medical diagnosis, pose at least a smoking gun, damning evidence, probable cause, reason enough to pry into the man’s professional dealings, into his mindset and capacities, his acumen for sane, legal, fair and effective governance on a national scale.
Maybe Trump’s a sick man. Maybe not. Maybe our leader did collude with Russia and maybe he didn’t. Maybe Trump’s corrupt as dirt or maybe utterly incompetent. Maybe Trump can govern effectively. Maybe he’s a clown.
Whatever the case, grave concerns are still in play and don’t forget, there are those who feel as I do, that a leader’s moral fiber, his voracity, his grace, his nobility, his reverence for democracy and all the American people, his love for both objective and universal truth along with grasp of media’s mission toward the best obtainable truth remain absolutely pivotal to good and viable leadership.
The gross moral turpitude oozing out of Donald Trump and leaching into the content of his many loathsome tweets ought to restrict the Chief-of-State from holding any public office. His Twitter bytes, many seeds of deep-down decadence whisper volumes and most inform the utmost importance in the news today of Donald Trump’s rank indecency.
–♦©M. D. Phillips–awincingglare.com