AP Photo Fourth Estate Stop Being Trump’s Twitter Fool

Jack Shafer is Politico’s senior media writer.

By this time you’d expect that people would have figured out when Donald Trump is yanking their chain and pay him the same mind they do phone calls tagged “Out of Area” by caller ID. But, no. Like Pavlov’s dog, too many of us leap to object or correct the president-elect whenever he composes a deliberately provocative tweet, as he did this morning, commenting on the somber and vaguely lecturing treatment vice president-elect Mike Pence earned from the cast last night at a performance of Hamilton. In an 8:56 a.m. tweet, he wrote:

“The Theater must always be a safe and special place. The cast of Hamilton was very rude last night to a very good man, Mike Pence. Apologize!”


Mass salivation flowed on Twitter in immediate response. The New Yorker’s Ryan Lizza rushed to the barricades to write, “Unhinged and bizarre response. He sounds like those whiny college kids demanding ‘safe spaces.’” Roger Ailes biographer Gabriel Sherman had Lizza’s flank, tweeting, “Trump’s Hamilton tweet is a terrifying glimpse of how he could attempt to suppress free speech. It should be openly condemned, esp by GOP.” Talking Points Memo editor/publisher Josh Marshall harumphed his rejoinder, “Let Americans be Americans; let the president whine like a baby; everyone be vigilant for when he does more than whines.” And so on from hundreds, maybe thousands, of outraged citizens.

Meanwhile, in the villainous golden lair he maintains in Trump Tower, Baby Donald laughed his best Dr. Evil laugh. Got ‘em again, he thought. Yesterday’s settlement of the Trump University lawsuit is the real news, but my Twitter incitement will dominate all else for at least 12 hours as people tweet, “How could he?”, “Oh, now he’s for safe spaces?” and “Don’t tell artists what to say or do!”

Haven’t any of these people raised children? Don’t they know about bait and switch? Have none of them been paying attention to Trump’s Twitter strategy for the past 17 months? For anybody who has read a half-dozen of Trump’s tweets, the pattern is obvious. He compiles these tweets precisely in order to elicit strident protest. It doesn’t matter to Trump that the cast of Hamilton was polite and respectful to Pence. It doesn’t matter that being rude to officeholders is an inalienable right—hell, a responsibility!—of all Americans. To Trump’s followers the content of any one of his rebukes matters less than whom it’s directed at—New York liberals and their fellow travelers in this instance. He could have tweeted something equally belligerent about the “unfair” treatment his daughter Ivanka is receiving in the press for having attended his meeting with Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe and he would have earned the same satisfying comeback from his foes.

This Trump tweet was especially delicious for invoking a liberal shibboleth—the need for “safe places”—as a dig at his opposition. He put them in the position of having to attack safe spaces as crazed coddling! The safe spaces concept is a modern example of crazed coddling, of course, and Trump doesn’t really believe in them. But he’s willing to engage in this sort of psy-ops as long as it sends the opposition chasing a red herring.

What then should we do when Trump taunts with such tweets? First, think before you tweet. Know that Trump wants you to tweet back at him the first thing that comes to your offended brain. Pause for just a minute, and if you must comment, try something like, “Sorry, Baby Donald, I’m not taking the bait.”

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Shame on all you suckerfish. Send handmade lures via email to [email protected]. My email alerts is a flounder, my Twitter feed a porgy, and my RSS feed loves to get scrod.