It is said that when UK prime minister Tony Blair left office, he did not how to use a mobile phone. The next generation of leaders saw
US president Barack Obama not only using an iPhone but also sending out a few anodyne words on Twitter. Donald Trump has become the Tweeter-in-Chief, making daily news through his smartphone.
It was with shock and anticipation that the world discovered that his (often intemperate) 34,300 pre-presidential tweets were likely to continue. In his first year as president, he spent, according to The Boston Globe, 40 hours sending out nearly 2,600 tweets in 2017. That batting average has continued into this year, with 129 this month alone up to Wednesday morning.
Trump is one of around 70 prominent world leaders to use Twitter but he is perhaps the only one who bombards his public in the
dead of night. The president fortunately does not drink – thank goodness Churchill was not a tweeter. Yet his 3am tweets rip away the veil of power exposing a brutal honesty on everything from core
policymaking to legal rebuffs and personal issues. They provide a unique window to the thoughts of the man with his finger on the
big button.
His first tweet after being elected in November 2016 was to say “we will come together as never before”. The next month saw attacks on protesters, crooked media (namely The New York Times, CNN and Saturday Night Live), fake news, the Democrats, celebrities, China and North Korea, and the Central Intelligence Agency and the Federal Bureau of Investigation.
It is traditional to expect pronouncements from the leader of United States to be a measured and pertinent insight into the world of politics, statesmanship and policy. Contrast the British and US position over the recent attacks on the Syrian chemical weapons factories. UK Prime Minister
Theresa May took the view that the less in the public domain, the better; so she delayed a parliamentary debate on the attacks. In the post-attack debate, she was not helped when her opponents pointed out that Trump had talked about bombing Syria for a week.
