On “Good Morning America” Friday, White House senior counselor Kellyanne Conway repeatedly insisted that President Trump can and should keep tweeting despite the massive negative blowback from two tweets he sent Thursday attacking Mika Brzezinski’s looks and intelligence.
“I like the fact that the president uses a social media platform to connect directly with Americans,” Conway told “GMA” host George Stephanapoulos, adding: “I endorse his ability to connect on social media with Americans.”
That’s been the default position of Trump’s aides since he started creating controversy on Twitter, which is to say, since he started using Twitter in his presidential campaign, which is to say, since the first day he announced his run for president.
The argument goes like this: Twitter allows Trump to end-run the media filter. It allows him to speak directly with the public. The only people who oppose his use of Twitter are the media who hate that they can’t control him! (Sidebar: Not true!)
“The Fake News Media hates when I use what has turned out to be my very powerful Social Media – over 100 million people! I can go around them,” Trump tweeted on June 16.
Here’s the thing: A series of recent polls suggest that the public — including lots and lots of Republicans — don’t think Trump’s tweets are a good thing. At all.
Six in 10 Americans in a Quinnipiac University poll released Thursday said that Trump should stop tweeting from his personal account. Just 32% said he should continue tweeting. Almost half (49%) of self-identified Republicans said Trump should stop tweeting; 43% wanted him to keep at it. That’s the first time since Quinnipiac started asking the “tweet” question that more Republicans thought Trump should stop tweeting than thought he should keep it up.
In an NPR/PBS/Marist poll released earlier this week, just 1 in 5 people said they found Trump’s tweeting to be “effective and informative” while 69% said it was “reckless and distracting.” Among Republicans, 43% called his tweets effective while 41% said they were distracting. Among Trump supporters, 48% opted for effective and 37% said distracting.
The broader point: Even among Trump’s most committed supporters, his use of Twitter is something far short of a slam dunk. And Republicans are becoming less and less accepting of his tweets as he continues to send them.
And remember this: These two polls were conducted before Trump’s twin tweets about Brzezinski and co-host Joe Scarborough. It’s hard to see how, if those same polls were conducted today, the results would look better for Trump. In fact, they would almost certainly look worse.
None of this means Trump is going to stop tweeting. He won’t. He likes the ability to drive the daily narrative. He likes the immediate positive feedback he gets from some of his supporters. He likes the thrill of stirring it up. (Trump is, at heart, a provocateur.)
Lots of people — including his allies, his wife and scores of Republican elected officials — have told him to tone down (or cut out) his tweets. He hasn’t listened. And he won’t listen.
But what deserves to be debunked is the idea that the public at large is clamoring for Trump’s tweets. Or that the party he represents is cheering on his social media presence. They aren’t.
What they are doing is learning to live with something they know they can’t change. Toleration is not adulation.
