Well, that was fast.
President-elect Donald Trump told CBS News that once he becomes President, he will tone down his Twitter presence. On the 60 Minutes episode which aired tonight, Trump said that he was happy to have used social media during the campaign. He called his use of Facebook and Twitter “tremendous,” one of his stock-in-trade adjectives for anyone or anything that he feels reflects well on him.
But he said that once he got into office, he’d curb his middle of the night Twitter habits in deference to the dignity of his position. He said:
“I’m going to be very restrained, if I use it at all, I’m going to be very restrained.”
Apparently either his promise was one of the most short-lived in human history, or Mr. Trump doesn’t consider this period of transition to be a part of his actual Presidency.
Trump spent Sunday morning on Twitter, blasting out one Tweet after another to gloat about the former Republican rivals who had called to congratulate him on his victory.
Jeb Bush, George W and George H.W. all called to express their best wishes on the win. Very nice!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) November 13, 2016
Mitt Romney called to congratulate me on the win. Very nice!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) November 13, 2016
He quickly moved on, though, to a typical Donald Trump attack on the media.
Trump has had a very contentious relationship with the New York Times since the start of the 2016 campaign. He threatened to keep Times reporters out of his rallies, and frequently referred to the news outlet as “failing.” The Times featured prominently in Trump’s paranoid claims that the election was being “rigged” by the “dishonest media.”
The failing @nytimes talks about anonymous sources and meetings that never happened. Their reporting is fiction. The media protects Hillary!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) August 14, 2016
This morning, just hours before the airing of the show in which he promised to restrain himself from using middle of the night Tweets, the President-elect turned his immature petulance back on the New York Newspaper. He tweeted again about the “failing” paper and claimed that it was losing readers after having covered his campaign “unfairly.”
The @nytimes sent a letter to their subscribers apologizing for their BAD coverage of me. I wonder if it will change – doubt it?
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) November 13, 2016
Wow, the @nytimes is losing thousands of subscribers because of their very poor and highly inaccurate coverage of the "Trump phenomena"
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) November 13, 2016
As we’ve seen over and over again in the past couple of years, so much of what Trump says or writes is just completely untrue. The New York Times responded, via Twitter, to Trump’s claims of lost subscribers.
The New York Times says it is gaining, not losing subscribers since the election. https://t.co/3saB5Ks2X6
— Blake Hounshell (powered by blockchain) (@blakehounshell) November 13, 2016
So what are we to make of this latest example of Mr. Trump and his vindictive need to poke his perceived enemies? What are we supposed to imagine will be the outcome if he decides that he needs to tweet out a 2 AM criticism of the President of North Korea or the Prime Minister of India?
We have elected an impulsive egomaniac with the emotional IQ of a nine year old.
Twitter keeps proving that to us, over and over again.
Featured image by Gage Skidmore via Flickr. Available through CC BY-SA 2.0 license.
