06/06/2020 The president is going to need a bigger Twitter account

The president is going to need a bigger Twitter account

washingtonpost.com/news/posteverything/wp/2017/09/26/the-president-is-going-to-need-a-bigger-twitter-
account/

By Daniel W. Drezner Daniel W. Drezner is a professor of international politics at the Fletcher School of Law and
Diplomacy at Tufts University and a regular contributor to PostEverything.

Last week the hard-working staff here at Spoiler Alerts argued that the president would
be tweeting more outrageous stuff more frequently. I suggested that he would do this as a
reaction to his historic weakness as president: “At this point, when Trump promises or
threatens on Twitter, no one believes him. As he acts more and more hysterical online, he
will further erode his ability to use social media to set the agenda.”

To be fair to the president, there is one thing his Twitter account is good for, and that is
temporary distraction.

Jeff B, fightin' the COVID one bootleg at a time

@EsotericCD

Why should I care about this when there are far more important
things going on, like Trump's tweeting about the NFL?
twitter.com/nickconfessore…

Nick Confessore @nickconfessore

3.6M Americans with no power; dwindling supplies of food, water, &
fuel. We are barreling towards another Katrina:
nytimes.com/2017/09/25/us/…

67 12:06 PM - Sep 26, 2017

19 people are talking about this

As noted last week, the president is facing a lot of imminent and difficult policy choices:
North Korea, tax reform, disaster relief in Puerto Rico, and eventually, the debt ceiling
and the budget. There are also additional political challenges: bad poll numbers, the
failure to repeal and replace Obamacare, the possibility of a Trump-endorsed candidate
losing a GOP Senate primary, etc.

Increasingly, however, Trump’s bloody-minded jihad against the NFL must be seen as an
attempt to distract from something far more dangerous to Trump: the malfeasance of his
Cabinet and White House staff.

Trump loves to recall his presidential campaign, so he should remember that he

campaigned on two themes: draining the swamp and Hillary Clinton’s sense of
entitlement. His administration was ostensibly going to be above the cozy perquisites of
power of previous administrations. Team Trump would swear off the arbitrary
application of rules to others but not to themselves. Trump’s inaugural address blasted

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06/06/2020 The president is going to need a bigger Twitter account

how “The establishment protected itself, but not the citizens of our country,” and
declared: “January 20th 2017, will be remembered as the day the people became the
rulers of this nation again.”

Let’s just review how this populist project has been going in the past two weeks:

Politico has reported on Health and Human Services Secretary Tom Price’s love
affair with chartered planes. This apparently started due to a canceled commercial
flight because of inclement weather, but grew to be such a habit that Price charted a
plane to fly from Dulles International Airport to Philadelphia. Which is nuts. The
reports are so bad that Price was forced to acknowledge that “the optics in some of
this don’t look good” and suspend the practice. Price’s allergy to commercial travel
is so bad that even this White House is distancing itself.
Price is hardly the only Cabinet official to demand travel perquisites. Treasury
Secretary Steven Mnuchin is being investigated for using a government plane to fly
to Fort Knox to possibly obtain a primo view of last month’s solar eclipse. Mnuchin
also started the paperwork to request a military plane to fly him to Europe for his
honeymoon. He also used a government plane to fly from New York back to
Washington after Trump’s news conference at Trump Tower. Mnuchin has insisted
that he needed these aircraft for secure national security communications. As a
former Treasury employee, let’s just say that I doubt that assertion. Oh, and
Environmental Protection Agency head Scott Pruitt is facing a similar investigation
into his frequent travel back to his home state of Oklahoma.
We learned from Politico that Jared Kushner set up a private email account and
occasionally used that account to conduct official business with other White House
officials. We learned from Newsweek that Ivanka Trump did the same thing. And
then the New York Times reported that at least six White House staffers did
something similar. That includes this priceless anecdote: “Most of Mr. Trump’s
aides used popular commercial email services like Gmail. Mr. Kushner created a
domain, IJKFamily.com, in December to host his family’s personal email.”

So, to sum up: Trump’s Cabinet officers sure seem to be enjoying the perquisites of
power, and the Trump White House thinks that the rules do not apply to them in the
same way they claimed the rules did not apply to the Clintons.

Writing in the Atlantic, David Graham beat me to the punch enunciated a theme that
seems increasingly clear about the Trump administration:

Trump’s aides and advisers seem to have come to believe that the force-field of gravity
distortion that protects the president will apply to them too. Whether they are right is less
clear….
A common knock on the Clintons was that they behaved as though the rules did not apply to
them. Already, some members of Trump’s inner circle are acting the same way. Feeling
immune to ordinary strictures can be alluring, but as Hillary Clinton learned, sometimes you
only discover too late that it’s an illusion.

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During the transition there were fierce debates among journalists about how to cover
Trump’s Twitter feed. Politico’s Jack Shafer argued that it was a massive misdirection
engine from real stories. Others argued that it would be inappropriate to ignore them.
Eight months into his administration, I think the epiphany should be obvious to
everyone. Sure, maybe Trump is trying to pick and choose Twitter fights that he thinks he
can win. However, there is too much malfeasance and incompetency to deflect.

If I were Trump I would be tweeting about the NFL, too. I would be tweeting about
anything that distracted people from my administration, which has accomplished nothing
populist in its first eight months. But no Twitter account, no matter how provocative, can
distract from the entitled, God-awful mess that is Trump’s presidency.

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