Turns out the real bully pulpit was the one Donald Trump could bully from (Twitter) and not the one Teddy Roosevelt was talking about.
Trump was never particularly interested in governing, nor in the wealth of confidential information the president is entitled to (he refused to read the presidential daily brief, relying on oral briefings). Since legislation ended up being too complicated for the reality television host, the only power that Trump wound up able to use was the attention that the president of the United States commands with his tweets. Trump was able to target that attention like the Death Star toward his enemies. And when he was deplatformed, he lost all his power, as if his iPhone were suddenly made of Kryptonite.
This is not to say Trump didn’t do a lot of damage with legislation (really mostly with executive orders), from tax cuts for millionaires to jailing children to taking away protection for people who desperately need them, to Arctic drilling, to killing 443,000 people by trying to wish away a pandemic.
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One of Trump’s last tweets was his declaration that “We will not be SILENCED!” Soon after, Trump was silenced. His 88 million Twitter followers gone, his platform vaporized. Certainly it was deserved. Trump has used his platform to cheer on bullying, abuse, and racism, but the final digital straw came because of violence, according to Twitter’s CEO Jack Dorsey, who tweeted on Jan. 13, “We made a decision with the best information we had based on threats to physical safety both on and off Twitter.” Twitter noted “we have permanently suspended the account due to the risk of further incitement of violence.”
No one was surprised; Trump had pushed the platform too far. Five people had died during the Capitol riot, deaths that were the result of violence the president encouraged. It wasn’t hard to thread the needle, to see how Twitter could theoretically be held culpable for incitements made on its platform.
But what none of us could predict was that without his Twitter, Trump would become so suddenly and overpoweringly, and one hopes irreversibly, impotent. Trump’s deplatforming shows the power of Twitter and social media more generally.
Trump was permanently banned on Jan. 8. This suspension happened 12 days from the end of his presidency. What happened next was kind of a surprising, at least to me. During those last 12 days of Trump’s shitty presidency, he was largely silent. The guy who used to tweet dozens of times a day, the guy who couldn’t stop tweeting, that guy, just stopped communicating.
And it’s not like he didn’t have a way to communicate! He was for those last 12 days still the president of the United States. There were other avenues available to him. He could have used the White House briefing room for any number of briefings but he didn’t. Trump had an entire apparatus to communicate with the media, and he didn’t use it. That’s because Trump didn’t use his Twitter account to communicate, he used it to bully people and to spread violent rhetoric.
Sure, in typical Trump fashion, he tried to work around the ban by using the official @POTUS account to get out a tweet against Twitter and “the radical left,” but those tweets were deleted almost as quickly as they were posted. Then Trump went to his @TeamTrump account to tweet his usual murky soup of disinformation and racism. Eventually all those accounts were suspended because they were used for the “purposes of evading a ban,” which is against Twitter rules.
Trump may have been able to find someone to take his SATs for him 50 years ago, but he couldn’t find a way to game Twitter. And Twitter was the way that he communicated with his supporters. Supposedly Jared Kushner and Dan Scavino advised Trump not to join other social media platforms like Gab. Without social media Trump had no bully pulpit from which to bully.
No time was his declining station clearer than during his feud with No. 3 GOP Rep. Liz Cheney, who had been the focus of Trump’s ire since voting to impeach him. The Daily Beast reported that “due to Twitter’s banning of the @realDonaldTrump account following the Capitol riot that Trump instigated, he has not been able to personally trash Cheney via his once widely read tweets.”
But this story actually gets more pathetic, if that’s possible. Trump had “written out insults and observations, several of them about Cheney, but with no ability to tweet them himself, he has resorted to suggesting put-downs for others to use or post to their own Twitter, according to a person with direct knowledge of this new habit.”
And let’s be clear about the truth of the matter here. Trump lost his power not because he was conservative but because he violated the terms and services he signed up for when he joined Twitter. The deputy director of the Center for Business and Human Rights at New York University’s Stern School of Business, Paul Barrett, told USA Today, “Republicans, or more broadly conservatives, have been spreading a form of disinformation on how they’re treated on social media. They complain they’re censored and suppressed, but not only is there not evidence to support that, what evidence exists actually cuts in the other direction.”
And if you were ever doubting that suspending Trump was in the interest of the greater good, I would point you to the Zignal Labs study which found that “online misinformation about election fraud plunged 73 percent” after Trump’s ban.
On Monday the new White House press secretary, Jen Psaki, said what we’ve all been thinking: “But I can’t say we miss him on Twitter.” It’s scary having a completely unhinged lunatic as president, but since the presidency is hard to use and requires the patience to legislate, Trump may have actually caused more damage with his dangerous incitements of violence and his emboldening white supremacists and spreading disinformation than he did with legislation.
And even though he surely liked tooling around in Air Force One, and being able to order up his iceberg lettuce with Russian (of course!) dressing and pushing his Diet Coke button whenever he felt like it, and taking a blowtorch to the Constitution as much as the next guy, I have little doubt that he misses being able to troll people on the internet a lot more than having actual responsibility.
