The Atlantic

Trump Tries to Sink Twitter, His Oldest Enabler

The president’s two strongest instincts stand pitted against each other: his need for attention and his need to punish enemies.
Source: Alex Brandon / AP

Tweets can be career-enders for the twits who post them. Remember the Taco Bell employee from 2012 who didn’t reckon it a firing offense to tweet a video of himself peeing onto a sumptuous heap of Nachos BellGrande. To no one’s surprise but his own, he reckoned wrong.

I’ve often wondered whether President Donald Trump, with his impulsive, counterproductive, inadvertently self-revealing tweets, could ever meet the same fate. The question was raised anew (by me) this week. It was a week shortened by the holiday, and Trump made fewer public statements than he does in a normal week. And so, away from the gaze of his admirers and the prying eyes of the press, he tweeted instead.

Seeing Trump exclusively through the prism of Twitter gives an incomplete picture, of course. It is best to take him in his totality as a public figure,

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