This, in a nutshell, is my analysis of President Donald Trump’s tweets:
They are unflinchingly candid and defiant in the face of political correctness. Occasionally the tweets’ wording is clumsy, and their timing is awkward. But, always, Trump says what he means. Like President Ronald Reagan, Trump is a man of a few simple, large ideas. We can extrapolate his domestic and foreign policies from his body of relevant tweets: lower taxes and fewer regulations, the wall, the emasculation of Obamacare, and the assertion of American military power. However, unlike Reagan, who was witty and self-effacing, Trump commands the language with cupped hands. He wields superlative adjectives the way a shot-putter heaves an iron ball, with mindless vigor rather than precision.
Any tweet Trump sends out that doesn’t have to do with less intrusive government, or illegal immigration, or international challenges to American interests, we may frankly regard as Twitter trash. These extraneous tweets serve only to feed the media’s frenzy. The same news media which breezily allowed former President Barack Obama’s scandals and blunders to escape their notice now turn their focus on Trump’s every misstep, like searchlights on a wart.
Obama’s political locution was unnervingly suave. To my ears, however, Obama sounded like a passive-aggressive firebrand. Whenever he opened his mouth, I heard: “You suck.” For eight years, I endured his lectures and insinuated insults. Forgive me for relishing the left’s hysteria over Trump’s slangy pronouncements.
Hillary Clinton lost because she lacked Obama’s smooth rhetorical obfuscation. Her speechifying exuded the boredom and tension of snarled traffic. Compared to her, at the debates, Trump was positively Whitman-esque.
I don’t even use a smartphone. I can gauge the effect of Trump’s tweets only from the pained uproar of the media. How tweet it is — says Trump to them — to be loathed by you!
— Alexander Lee, West Chicago
