Trump’s ‘Mean Tweets’ Weren’t the Problem; His Deceptive Tweets Were

A mythology has sprouted up around Donald Trump. The former president’s supporters maintain that the bad odor about their movement’s avatar is a fabrication — a superficial and silly rationalization wielded by his enemies to tarnish his record in office. They derisively categorize these offenses as little more than “mean tweets” and dismiss their significance summarily.

As one late-2018 poll revealed, most Americans never encountered Trump’s Twitter feed — either directly or secondhand via news media. Just 15 percent of those surveyed were regularly confronted with Trump’s online missives, and that minority comprised more Democrats than Republicans. When the president would summon all the vitriol of which he was capable to prosecute this feud or that — none of them are especially memorable — 80 percent indicated they either did not understand the conflict or didn’t care enough about it to change their views.

“Mean tweets,” as many of Trump’s critics have explained, is a phrase occasionally bandied about to dismiss concerns about the president’s conduct as stylistic and, therefore, shallow. Those critics have done an admirable job articulating why this is not an argument but an exercise in avoidance. And yet, Trump’s defenders have a point insofar as the former president’s spleen-venting contortions on the internet have little staying power.

No one quite remembers why Trump was so angry at the retailer Nordstrom. They don’t recall what came of that bizarre effort to goad law enforcement into investigating MSNBC host Joe Scarborough over the tragic death of one of his former congressional staffers. FCC chairman Ajit Pai’s reputation remains intact despite his refusal to make NBC News suffer for some long-forgotten offense. For the most part, the tweets were ephemeral.

Trump’s defenders might think that buttresses their view on the inconsequence of the former president’s tweets — even those that gave succor to violent conspiracists and cranks. But if they are unmoved by appeals to civic decency, they should at least display some contempt for an enterprise dedicated to their own deception. “Mean tweets” encapsulates only some of Trump’s communication strategy during his term in office. The rest of the story involves the way in which he used Twitter to assuage his supporters by telling them things they wanted to hear even if those things were in no way reflective of his own policies.

I was reminded of Trump’s unlovely habit while remarking on the former president’s efforts to revise his own record on the pandemic — a bewildering display in which Trump maintained that his approach to mitigating the spread of the virus was, in fact, radically libertarian, and that it was somehow Ron DeSantis, not he, who preserved Dr. Antony Fauci in his sinecure. Trump’s claims brought to mind his rhetorical support for those who sought to “LIBERATE” their states from Covid-related restrictions on social and economic life, even as he took few concrete steps to ease such restrictions.

While Trump tweeted, his administration established unnavigable guidelines designed to preserve state-level shutdowns, and his White House hectored Republican governors who deviated from that course until they backed down. The tongue-lashing to which Trump treated Georgia governor Brian Kemp when he began reopening his state to commerce in spring 2020 suggests Trump’s pandemic policies were, indeed, his own, but you wouldn’t know it from reading his Twitter feed. In that alternate reality, Trump was a mere spectator in his own administration.

Trump’s criticisms of pandemic restrictions mirrored those of conservative and Republican voters, but his White House’s policies were not reflective of the sentiments he disgorged onto the internet. That happened a lot.

During one of the negotiations over a short-term deal to fund the government that have become so commonplace in Congresses governed by impossibly small majorities, Trump threw a wrench in the works by insisting that a Democratic ask — funding for the Children’s Health Insurance Program — shouldn’t be part of the talks. The tweets channeled conservatives’ frustrations with the process, but they weren’t reflective of his administration’s policies. The tweets “confounded even Trump’s aides inside the West Wing,” CNN reported. “Hours after Trump’s tweets a White House official issued a statement to reiterate that Trump supports the short-term spending deal being pushed by Republicans.”

Trump’s online rhetoric in regard to his immigration preferences was similarly confused. “I never pushed the Republicans in the House to vote for the Immigration Bill, either GOODLATTE 1 or 2,” Trump wrote just three days after he insisted that “HOUSE REPUBLICANS SHOULD PASS THE STRONG BUT FAIR IMMIGRATION BILL, KNOWN AS GOODLATTE II.” The same phenomenon was apparent in tweets alleging that “Mexico is doing very little, if not NOTHING, at stopping people from flowing into Mexico through their Southern Border,” a claim that came just 24 hours after he’d said that Mexico has “very strong border laws.” The schizophrenia was inspired by productive negotiations in Congress over border- and immigration-reform proposals, some of which irritated the GOP’s more uncompromising border hawks. The president’s effort to mimic his Republican critics placated them even if the sentiments he expressed were entirely divorced from his White House’s approach to the issue.

“Mr. President, this is not the way to go,” said former Fox News Channel personality Andrew Napolitano in a direct-to-camera appeal to the president to oppose an extension of the National Security Agency’s authority to conduct surveillance of foreigners. The supplication had its intended effect. “This is the act that may have been used, with the help of the discredited and phony Dossier, to so badly surveil and abuse the Trump Campaign by the previous administration and others?” the president tweeted soon after. Trump’s sudden hostility contradicted his White House’s effort to lobby lawmakers in favor of extending the NSA’s counterterrorism powers, and discerning conservatives were left to wonder whether the president or his administration would win this internal dispute. But there was no dispute at all. Hours later, following the intervention of his staff, Trump endorsed the very provision he had just railed against. “We need it!” he insisted. “Get smart!” The president’s television-inspired remarks were soon forgotten.

Republicans seem to remember Trump’s social-media habits as either funny asides or inconsequential distractions — or both. The president’s tendency to contradict himself and his subordinates in his online remarks had become an international joke within his first year in office. But Trump also regularly used Twitter to mollify conservatives even as his administration did the opposite of what he was saying in public.

Republicans are apt to mock those who talk about Trump’s tweets as though they mattered. By and large, they didn’t. But that is true of both the “mean tweets” and Trump’s more substantive remarks. Trump fans tell themselves they’re in on the joke, but too often, they are the butt of it.