Trump’s thin skin on display again
“The world was gloomy before I won – there was no hope. Now the market is up nearly 10 percent聽 and Christmas spending is over a trillion dollars!”
Donald Trump on Twitter December 26th, at 6:32 PM
Donald Trump was in fine form the day after Christmas when he made his pronouncement that his election had lifted the gloom that had been hovering over the entire world.
He was wrong, of course.
“The Donald” doesn’t need the truth. All he needs is his cellphone, and his fact-free tweets will fly out of it.
The following day, he “tweeted” himself on the back, when he typed, “The U.S. Consumer Confidence Index for December surged nearly four points to 113.7, THE HIGHEST LEVEL IN MORE THAN 15 YEARS! Thanks Donald!”
And with each Donald tweet, there’s always Twitter pushback.
“My confidence about the U.S.’s future plunged in December, to the lowest level in 41 years. Thanks Donald,” replied writer Rebecca Traister.
Welcome to the new norm.
After Jan. 20, the most powerful man on earth will have both the nuclear codes, and his little tweet-maker within reach.
It’s troubling, but he doesn’t seem to know which is more important.
In fact, his newly-named White House Press Secretary, Sean Spicer, relishes the opportunities for his new boss’s ability to bypass the American media with his frequent 140 character salvos.
“He has this direct pipeline to the American people,” says Spicer. “He’s been able to put his thoughts out there, and hear what they’re thinking in a way that no one’s been able to do before,” he added.
That statement isn’t even as true as one of Trump’s poorly fact-checked tweets.
Trump only has 18 million Twitter followers. President Obama has 80 million. And singer/songwriter Katy Perry has a whopping 94.9 million people who follow her on Twitter.
But since he knows that his rabid followers are hanging on every tweet, Trump doesn’t care what the media, or the rest of American thinks.
That’s why he hasn’t given a news conference since July 27. And why, unlike every president since Dwight Eisenhower, he hasn’t bothered to give one within few days of his election.
He claims he doesn’t need the media. But he obviously pays a great deal of attention to it.
President Obama made headlines last week when he implied that he could have fared better against Trump if he would have run for a third term.
“I think that I could’ve mobilized a majority of the American people to rally behind it (with his message of Hope and Change),” Obama said.
Trump’s media tentacles perked up, and he couldn’t fight his Twitter fixation.
“President Obama said that he thinks he would have won against me. He should say that but I say NO WAY! – jobs leaving, ISIS, OCare, etc.,” he tweeted.
Well, well, well! Before the Tweet-master reached for his handy cellphone, he should have paid closer attention to what the president really had said.
He’d used the phrase “a majority of the American people.” Trump’s outsized ego still hasn’t allowed him to understand that “a majority of the American people (voters), chose Hillary Clinton over him by 2,864,974 votes.
Obama’s campaign, minus Clinton’s email scandals, may have been no contest.
We’ll never know, will we?
What we do know is that Trump’s thin-skin gets severely chafed, anytime there’s the hint of a slight.
Obama never even mentioned Trump.
But Trump just had to respond. Then he responded again.
“Doing my best to disregard the many inflammatory President O statements and roadblocks. Thought it was going to be a smooth transition – NOT!” he tweeted.
Is that the same Donald Trump who sang the praises of Obama back in early December?
“I really like him. We have really good chemistry together. We talk. He loves the country. He wants to do right by the country and for the country,” he told the Today’s Matt Lauer.
Or, is that the same Donald Trump who claimed Obama “has been the most ignorant president in our history.”
I suppose we’ll never know.
Uniontown native Edward A. Owens is a three time Emmy Award winner and 20-year veteran of television news. E-mail him at freedoms@bellatlantic.net