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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 damage the lives of innocent people.

Comparing the president’s use of communication to former presidents showcases the startling differences between Trump and presidents of past. “In the past, if a President was drafting remarks to be delivered through traditional mediums and the remarks referred disparagingly to a particular individual, defamatory language undoubtedly would be stricken or wordsmithed” (McKechnie 3). This would obviously be done to maintain the image of the president and these messages would have been looked over by an adviser charged with helping the president communicate in a fair, non-aggressive and inclusive way. An example of a president like this was Barack Obama. Obama did not control his own social media, but instead had a campaign team operate the official President of the United States (POTUS) Twitter account. Obama signed off on the tweets accredited to the POTUS account, which were never uninterrupted trains of thought and in-the-moment partisan messages (McKechnie 8). This maintained the image of the president, while still showcasing his ability to communicate to the entirety of the population of the United States, instead of just his own supporters.

These points have been made to argue that Donald Trump is using presidential communication for the benefit of himself and to solidify his support among his core base. Trump though does have a legion of followers that agree with him and would disagree with what this paper has argued. An example of a rebuttal that the Trump base would argue for is that the ‘fake news” that Trump points to do really have preconceived bias towards the Democrats and will only support them. This occurs not only in the newspapers, but on global television networks that he believes is biased against him. That reasoning is his explanation for only appearing and giving interviews to the networks he likes, such as Fox News, so he is able to converse without interruption. This reasoning continues when discussing the use of his preferred communication technology, Twitter. Arguments for the president when it comes to Twitter are that he doesn’t lash out against his opponents, but speaks the truth, which he is allowed to do as a citizen. Indeed, some see this “as a positive hallmark” (McKechnie 2) of the age because Trump is able to speak freely and not be controlled by his advisors. Rebuttals like this are clear and can be debated, but