Sample Solution

es not use Twitter to directly address the entirety of the country; he acts not as if he is President of the United States but as if he is President of the Trump Supporters in the United States. His use of Twitter for personal ends and not presidential advancement are denigrating the importance of the presidency.

Trump use of Twitter is his most widespread tool to spreading his messages, but his relationship to previous tools of presidential communication have also not been like that of previous presidents. When newspapers publish facts, views or ideas that negate Trump’s personal image he uses his major form of presidential communication to insult and attack those that work in newspapers. A Trump tweet that creates conflict and undermines the legitimacy of the newspaper industry can be seen in a tweet like “Failing @NYTimes will always take a good story about me and make it bad. Every article is unfair and biased. Very sad!” (Trump Twitter.com). This is just one example of the type of simple yet impulsive language that is sent into the Internet by the President for the world to see. Presidential communication has been a way to discuss and engage with the people of the country, but Trump has forgone that. Trump tweets without the thought of consequence and continues to use his platform to polarize politics and the discussion of politics, which does not help to spread the democratic conversation.

Trump has also devalued another form of presidential communication, the radio, which he does not seem to use at all. In terms of television, Trump has only had one official televised address to the nation in the two years he has been president, so live public conversations are activities he avoids. The only time Trump likes to be on television in real time is when he is on what he perceives to be a politically supportive channel, such as Fox News. As with his social media posts, his appearances on partisan US television adds fuel to the flame of partisanship and creates even more polarization among the people of the country. Trump encourages people to dispute fact and call it fiction by only watching news that is aligned with their political beliefs. Indeed, such is Trump’s aversion to most television that many outlets have to follow the president’s social media to extract news and stories. “Twitter and its underlying logic will continue to supplant television and its underlying logic as the dominant epistemology of the moment” (Ott 66) for the president because it is something that places him in total control of an unmediated message to those that support him. This divisiveness is being creating by this partisanship politics that stems from social media and television and this hurts the nation because divisiveness creates conflict which escalates into situations that can dam