Commentary
“Please tell the president to stop it with the tweets!”
If I had a dollar for every time a nominal conservative makes this plea to me in person, well let’s just say I’d have lots of dollars. My response is, however, always the same: “If not for rare truth-tellers like Sean Hannity and candidate Donald Trump’s Twitter feed, Hillary Rodham Clinton would now be the president.”
The overwhelming majority of the “mainstream” media is indeed fake news and “the enemy of the people,” and social media is how Trump vaulted over their misrepresentations and outright lies to speak directly to the electorate to become President Trump.
There’s a very good reason he now has more than 62 million followers on that one platform alone, but what he has done is far more significant than short-circuit the propaganda of the pseudo “journalists” at CNN, The New York Times, et al.
In the last 2 1/2 years, with a tweet here, and another tweet there, Trump has successfully and repeatedly baited the most pernicious anti-American actors on the national stage so they reveal themselves to the whole world for who they really are and the threat they represent to our Republic and its founding principles.
Many members of Team MAGA like to believe and propagate the idea that Trump is a modern-day Machiavelli who “plays politics” like a certain fictional Vulcan plays three-dimensional chess. Wrong.
I’ve advised the president before he became the most powerful man in the world, after which I served him as his strategist in the White House. His modus operandi is not plotting and conniving. It is instinctual, even preternatural. He has a remarkable sense of who people are and what their real intent is, and he divines that incredibly rapidly. Plus, he knows how to elicit a specific response from that person and has an uncanny capacity to cut through the disinformation, slaughter any sacred cows that get in his way, and show the world what the truth really is on any given matter or with regard to any specific public figure. Just consider the following examples:
Just a few weeks after his inauguration, Trump wrote on Twitter that he and his campaign had been “wiretapped,” only to be vilified until we found out that, yes indeed, the Obama Administration had been surveilling his national security adviser, filing illegal FISA warrants against campaign members such as Carter Page, and deploying FBI human intelligence “assets” on multiple occasions, hoping to entrap his team members.
Or his social media comments on the ingratitude of millionaire celebrity football players such as Colin Kaepernick who disrespect the flag, which hundreds of thousands of Americans have died to protect. The result was NFL ratings plummeting to the lowest seen in decades.
And, of course, there’s the “Squad,” the freshmen congresswomen who I prefer to refer to as the Four Horsewomen of the Apocalypse. When the president tweeted out that they should return from whence they came to fix the dire conditions there before they come back to lecture the rest of America on how to make things better, the furor was at a fever pitch until the smart observers realized what he had actually done.
By forcing Nancy Pelosi to come to the aid of the four and then shining a light on their anti-Semitic, un-American, and often-crazed stances, the president had achieved what no one else on the right had been able to: show the whole world just how radical and extreme the Democrat Party has become, how the lunatics have truly taken over the asylum. A remarkable feat.
And then there is, of course, rat-infested Baltimore.
Baltimore, like any large city that has been run by the Democrats for generations, is a hellhole, with disproportionately high rates of poverty, corruption, and crime. But how many people were talking about the realities of living in such a Dantean Democrat Disaster zone? How often has the plight of such ghettoized leftist swamps become a national issue for days on end in such a way that the corruption and malfeasance of those truly responsible—such as Elijah Cummings—became the focus of attention? You see how this works?
Trump doesn’t simply speak bluntly about problems that need to be fixed, be it China’s economic warfare against America and the West, the need to crush ISIS, or the modern political plantations of dependency the Democrats have created across the nation. He isn’t just the Master of the Deal, he is the Master of Modern Media, the martial arts master of the Art of Twitter Ju-Jitsu.
And think of this: He has more than 450 days until we make our national decision again about the direction America should take for the next four years.
That’s a lot of tweets.
Sebastian Gorka, Ph.D., is former deputy assistant for strategy to President Trump, host of the nationally syndicated America First, SebGorka.com, and author of new book: “The War for America’s Soul.” Follow him on Twitter @SebGorka.