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Is Trump’s Twitter Changing the Presidency?

Brian Feldman writes:

Among myriad concerns surrounding a Donald Trump presidency, somewhere right in the center of the list — maybe just slightly closer to the bottom than the top in terms of importance — is his relation to the press. Or more accurately: the way in which he uses it. Depending on whom you ask, Trump is either a masterful manipulator of the media, or an unhinged lunatic with an itchy trigger finger hovering millimeters over a big red button that says “TWEET.”

In The Republic of Spin: An Inside History of the American Presidency, historian David Greenberg chronicles a century-long history of the executive branch and the reporters that cover it. Reading it, I was, in some vague way, comforted by the extent to which Trump resembles his forebears. A century ago, Theodore Roosevelt was coddling reporters in off-the-record meetings, blacklisting those who didn’t cater to his agenda, and taking flak from the old guard for using his celebrity as a war hero to further his political aims. “To criticize Roosevelt for love of the camera and the headline is childish,” philosopher John Dewey wrote at the time, “unless we recognize that in such criticism we are condemning the very conditions of any public success during this period.” It’s a defense that, verbatim, applies to Trump today. Has social media really changed the way that leaders like Trump operate? Over the phone and email this week, I asked Greenberg about the new frontiers of presidential communications; what follows is an edited transcript of our conversations.

Obviously there’s a lot of talk about Trump and the way he uses social media to … get his thoughts out there, for lack of a better phrase. In the grand scheme of things, does Trump’s use of the media and social media differ that much from presidents past?

Well, I think that piece has been overstated. There’s definitely stuff to talk about and write about, but I think that’s not mainly what Trump is about. I think Trump is about particular ideas and style, which, obviously, the media convey. So, he’s a demagogue, and, you know, we had demagogues in the age of radio and we had demagogues in the age of television. He’s a demagogue for the age of social media, but I don’t think those things are so fundamentally different. I don’t think Trump never could have succeeded were people still getting their news from the three networks, for example. I think those kinds of claims, or constructs, are not very persuasive.

I do think there’s a lot to talk about and think about about how he has used and exploited the media very effectively. And, in some ways, differently from other candidates and other politicians. First, obviously, is Twitter. One thing people will say, and he is wrong, is that Twitter gives Trump a direct pipeline to the public to express his view. Well, look, presidents and politicians have always had that. They’d go on TV, they could go on radio, they could give speeches, they could issue press releases. And, especially once they held office, that was actually a pretty direct channel. And yes, the media then sort of learned how to kind of fight back and offer an interpretation to the presidential message. When presidents first started giving prime-time Oval Office addresses, you didn’t have the kind of postgame analysis that they learned to develop as a way of making sure they weren’t just stenographers, that they weren’t just conveying the presidential message without due skepticism, and critique, and interpretation and so on.

But that’s not what’s distinctive about Twitter. What’s distinctive about Twitter, I think, is the form. One thing that we know Twitter for is “Twitter wars.” It’s a format that is particularly friendly to short, angry bursts, back-and-forth volleys — quick, often unreflective outbursts. That’s something that Trump has done that’s different. Obama had a Twitter feed and there were pieces about how significant it was that this was the first presidential Twitter feed, but you’d be hard-pressed to think of a single tweet of Obama’s that was really memorable. So Trump is using it differently. In my book, I write about how Calvin Coolidge doesn’t get credit as a great radio pioneer even though he had the first radio inaugural address, the first radio broadcast nomination acceptance address, first broadcast State of the Union address. Because his were basically regular speeches to which you hooked up a microphone and a wire and could reach California and that was significant. But it was Franklin Roosevelt who, with “fireside chats,” actually wrote speeches for radio, wrote shorter speeches, wrote speeches using colloquial language, made them very policy-specific. He perceived of the whole project as a radio project. That’s, I think, what was different.

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