The hottest news over the past few days in the U.S. has been President Donald trump’s Twitter behavior after he tweeted sexist remarks about “Morning Joe” host Mika Brzezinski. The president, in his latest tweet, complained that more worthy news is being snubbed by mainstream media.
Dow hit a new intraday all-time high! I wonder whether or not the Fake News Media will so report?
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) July 3, 2017
Reuters wrote about the Dow Jones hitting an intraday record as well as MarketWatch, Bloomberg, and Nasdaq. Trump, however, cannot blame media for using his tweets as the main source of their headlines because the White House had confirmed the president’s tweets are official administration policies.
Dubious social media skills
The problem, The Washington Post pointed out, is that Trump defends his tweeting as part of being a modern-day president which, in turn, is based on an assumption he has social media skills. The newspaper compared the president and his predecessor, Barack Obama, who also used Twitter during his eight-year term.
Among the metrics used by The Washington Post were retweets per month, tweets per month, and retweets per tweet. In the first two categories, Trump was ahead. The newspaper used Trump’s @POTUS and @realDonaldTrump handles, while it used @POTUS44 and @BarackObama for the former president to compare their metrics.
Obama was ahead of Trump in the retweets per month only once, in January 2017, when he said goodbye as president of the U.S.
For tweets per month, Trump’s personal Twitter has around 200 tweets, while both handles of Obama had low tweet numbers.
When retweets per tweet data were reviewed, this was where a big difference was noted. Trump tweeted more, but his tweets were hardly retweeted, while it was the opposite for Obama. The Washington Post, which did not name the two presidents when it asked in a poll which of the two – the number of tweets or number of retweets – is a better measure, found over two-thirds of the respondents pointed to retweets.
The conclusion reached by the comparison is that Obama used Twitter more effectively than Trump.
The biographer speaks
A CNN interview with Tim O’Brien, the biographer of Trump, could give more insights behind Trump’s Twitter behavior. O’Brien, who wrote “TrumpNation, the Art of Being the Donald,” said the billionaire uses the microblogging site only for self-preservation or self-aggrandizement.
After Trump posted the CNN slamming video, O’Brien said on CNN’s “New Day” show that the president tweets to distract people from real issues such as the Russia interference in the 2016 election. He said Trump is not a strategic thinker. Rather, the former “The Apprentice” host stirs controversy when he wants to tweak media coverage in another direction. He added that Trump and other politicians have been setting up media as the punching bag if they are concerned about broader threats to their agenda.
