Kerry warns Trump against abusing Twitter Trump’s tweets possess the power to move markets, particularly when he bashes U.S. companies for exporting jobs abroad.

Secretary of State John Kerry on Tuesday rebuked America’s incoming tweeter-in-chief, Donald Trump, warning Americans that “we have a problem” if the president-elect sets policy via social media to escape accountability.

“If policy is gonna be made in 140 characters on Twitter and every reasonable measurement of accountability is being bypassed and people don’t care about it, we have a problem,” Kerry said Tuesday morning during a moderated discussion with Judy Woodruff of “PBS NewsHour.” “And it’s not just our problem here in the United States. It’s all over the world.”


Indeed, Trump has notoriously used his Twitter account as his primary messaging platform since he launched his presidential campaign. His erratic tweets, however, are sometimes devoid of fact and tend to lack adequate context, if any at all.

Nevertheless, the president-elect often blasts short messages to his 19 million-plus followers, bypassing the traditional norm of having his transition team issue a formal press release that the media would report on.

Trump’s tweets possess the power to move markets, particularly when he bashes U.S. companies for exporting jobs abroad. On Monday alone, he used the social media platform to attack “Hillary flunky” Meryl Streep after she criticized him at the Golden Globes, denied mocking a disabled reporter despite video that suggests otherwise and thanked Ford and Fiat Chrysler for keeping jobs in America.

His tweeting style appears to have emboldened the Russian embassy, which shared a white supremacist meme Monday and in late December tweeted an image of a duck with the text "LAME" in the foreground to depict President Barack Obama as a lame duck.

Speaking at what was billed a Passing the Baton conference hosted by the U.S. Institute of Peace, Kerry rhetorically used that baton to bludgeon the president-elect.

He tacitly denounced Trump’s campaigning style and rhetoric and warned of the global dangers of a fact-free world the billionaire businessman has helped create.

“One of the greatest challenges we all face right now, not just America but every country in the world, is we are living in a fact-less political environment,” he said. “And every country in the world better stop and start worrying about authoritarian populism and the absence of substance in our dialogue, if you call it that.”

The State Department chief noted the “long, well-defined history of what happens when you have economic fear and pressure, and a level of exploitation of those fears, coupled with sectarian or ethnic exploitation and a kind of simplistic, sloganeering politics.”

With hard-line positions on trade and immigration and his ubiquitous “Make America great again” slogan, Trump has advocated an “America first” foreign policy approach that the president-elect says will bring back American jobs. He has seized on the terror threats the world faces and promised to make America safe by building a wall on the southern border that he says Mexico will eventually pay for, in addition to proposing “extreme vetting” of individuals entering the U.S. from certain regions of the world.

Kerry said the issue is one “I think a lot of people are struggling with” but insisted that Americans must fight it.

“This is a huge problem, folks, and we’re all gonna have to figure out how we are going to restore a measure of accountability to our system,” he said.

Kerry, who described the transition at the State Department as pretty smooth — because interaction has been “fairly limited” — said he has not yet met with his successor, former ExxonMobil CEO Rex Tillerson, who will testify Wednesday before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. He also took issue with how lax Trump’s transition team and the Republican-led Congress has been on the nomination process.

“We have a whole bunch of hearings that are taking place without any — and I’m stepping beyond my bailiwick, but it’s quite amazing to me when I think of the hoops I had to jump through with respect to papers submitted and documentation and tax returns and a whole bunch of things,” he said. “Suddenly, that’s gone poof and it’s not as important. So I think we have a lot of reckoning to do in our country in the next days and months, and I can assure you that when I’m out of this office, I’m gonna spend time along with a lot of others trying to focus on it.”

With respect to the Obama administration’s efforts on international issues like the Paris climate agreement and the Iran nuclear deal, both of which Trump has panned, Kerry expressed confidence that common sense would prevail in the next administration.

“If that were just arbitrarily undone,” Kerry warned of the Iran deal, “we’re going back to a place of conflict almost immediately.”

“It doesn’t make sense,” he added. “And I believe reason will win out. Same thing on the Paris agreement, on climate change.”