The man and the machine: How Trump wields Twitter as his greatest political weapon

“I understand social media maybe better than anybody, ever,” Donald Trump said in November. “Somebody said I’m the Ernest Hemingway of 140 characters.”

Many have tried to understand the unique power of Trump’s “beautiful Twitter account,” as he put it, according to Megyn Kelly. Twitter of course is the perfect format for the president – it allows him to issue one-way blasts and ignore questions, responses and retaliations. 

But this is not why The Donald’s Twitter is so “beautiful.” It’s has become key to his political strategy — but not for the reason you may think.

{mosads}Take, for example, Trump’s March 4 Twitter volley, accusing his predecessor — seemingly out of nowhere — of wiretapping Trump Tower during the campaign.

It is no secret that Trump’s Twitter bombs often serve as a distraction from a negative news cycle. Two days before his wiretap tweet, Trump’s earliest Senate supporter, Attorney General Jeff Sessions, had just bowed to mounting attacks regarding inaccuracies in his confirmation hearing testimony and recused himself from the investigation into whether the Trump campaign team had cooperated with Russian intelligence. Even after the recusal, the Sessions story wasn’t over; calls were still coming in for Sessions to resign. Trump and his White House team were losing control.

As usual, Trump’s tweets quickly changed the focus of every national news outlet.

Terrible! Just found out that Obama had my “wires tapped” in Trump Tower just before the victory. Nothing found. This is McCarthyism!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) March 4, 2017

Two hours after the president’s tweet, Fox’s Sean Hannity followed with his own, pushing the story further over the next few days. The next day, the originator of the Obama administration spying conspiracy, Mark Levin, was interviewed on Fox. Breitbart then posted the Fox interview, highlighting a quote from Levin’s opening statement: “The evidence is overwhelming. This is not about President Trump’s tweeting. This is about the Obama administration spying, and the question is not whether it spied. We know they went to the FISA court twice. The question is who they did spy on and the extent of the spying on is the Trump campaign, the Trump transition, Trump surrogates.”

The national media and social media went into a frenzy, churning out stories on Trump’s wiretapping claim and diverting attention from the administration’s ongoing war on federal government agencies and Trump aides’ links to Russian intelligence. 

How low has President Obama gone to tapp my phones during the very sacred election process. This is Nixon/Watergate. Bad (or sick) guy!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) March 4, 2017

Meanwhile, as we fulminated and opinionated on Trump’s wiretap claim, we lost focus on the Russia story. The question of just what Sessions and the Russian ambassador discussed in their meeting during the campaign — the meeting that Sessions had failed to disclose and was responsible for Trump’s bad news cycle — has faded into the background.

The president’s ability to divert attention is like that of a magician: He can tell you exactly how he does a trick, but you still can’t force yourself to look away from his misdirection. Each time, we end up amazed at how we were suckered by yet another obvious illusion.  

This is exactly what Bill Clinton said toward the end of the campaign: Focus on the issues, not on Trump and his obvious distortions. We still have not learned this lesson.

But Trump’s tweets are not just about diversion. Do not fall for the conceit that Donald Hemingway’s real audience is all of us citizens and voters. The main goal of Trump’s beautiful Twitter madness is to reach his base — the marginalized whites who feel threatened by demographic change, who are made sick and poor by corporate greed — and bind them in shared righteous anger and victimhood. 

The Sessions recusal was a direct threat to Trump: It was an implicit admission of fault, a sign of weakness, a crack in his edifice.

For thousands of years, those in power have known that a single crack in the public image of invincibility is a wedge that can destroy the image of control — and the loss of real power follows soon after.

Trump’s Twitter barrage was aimed at his core supporters. It was meant to counter the recusal, to plaster over the crack. It was not Trump’s team that had erred, his tweet implies; in fact, they were the ones who had been wronged.

Is it legal for a sitting President to be “wire tapping” a race for president prior to an election? Turned down by court earlier. A NEW LOW!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) March 4, 2017

But why does Trump, who has few fixed policy goals, care about maintaining the loyalty of the base now, after having gained the power of the presidency?

It’s clear that his presidential success is now linked to fulfilling key promises that depend on congressional legislation: ObamaCare repeal, tax relief for the wealthy, a military build-up. Trump has little interest in the “complicated” particulars, but he does need to manage rebels at both ends of the Republican spectrum: far-right House Freedom Caucus members and wavering moderate senators.

During the campaign, Trump’s down-ticket power was awesome: He forced independent-minded leaders whom he had earlier insulted to kiss his ring, like Ted Cruz and John McCain. To make sure the fault lines among Republicans don’t torpedo his promised changes, President Trump must maintain that kind of power over a broad swath of Republican legislators. And that means making sure the majority of Republicans stay faithful to him alone.

And so Trump counts on propaganda follow-up to his tweet-bombs, by Fox and by Breitbart and by the rest of the fake-news cottage industry, generating specialized provocative content followed by his most passionate supporters. After the Fox and Breitbart stories went up about Trump’s wiretap claims, the story showed up quickly on sites like Chronicles Magazine, The Daily Caller, and Daily Stormer, as well as Russia’s English-language propaganda site RT.

The devaluation of truth has lowered the credibility bar for entry. One man created a fake news site just to see how many people he could fool with headlines like, “Obama tweet: Trump must be removed, by any means necessary.” The site quickly hit a million views. “I was surprised by how gullible the people in the Trump groups were, but as I continued to write ridiculous things they just kept getting shared and I kept drawing more viewers,” the creator told PolitiFact. “I saw how many fake ridiculous stories were making rounds in these groups and just wanted to see how ridiculous they could get.”

The majority of Republicans now believe that Obama had criminally wiretapped Trump Tower, despite the lack of evidence and denial of top intelligence officials. Mission accomplished. 

Trump can always find someone to blame for any individual failures, but an inability to keep critical promises will make the president appear weaker and weaker and, eventually, politically impotent. The loss of the reality-TV magician’s ability to attract and then misdirect will be disastrous. That is why, to keep the cracks from spreading and eventually bringing down his edifice of strength, Trump relies on his echo chamber in the alt-fact media and blogosphere.  

Mark Feinberg, Ph.D., is a research professor of Health and Human Development at Pennsylvania State University.

The views expressed by contributors are their own and not the views of The Hill.