President Donald Trump delivers a statement in the Rose Garden of the White House, Wednesday, May 22, 2019, in Washington. | AP Photo/Evan Vucci Fourth Estate A New Way to Cover Trump’s Tweets The press needs a few new guidelines to keep one itchy finger from derailing the whole 2020 campaign.

Jack Shafer is Politico's senior media writer.

President Donald Trump has been tweeting and retweeting with such velocity in recent weeks that his fingertips must be raw. For the past month, he’s been blasting an average of 22 tweets a day from his presidential bunker, and hitting some extreme peaks: Trump got so worked up on May 11 that he tweeted or retweeted 71 times about border security, the Democrats and tariffs. Not long before, on May 1, he fired off 84 tweets and retweets seeking to prove that America’s firefighters love him more than Joe Biden, who just got an endorsement from the largest firefighter union.

As it has since 2015, the press corps scrambles to cover his every tweet like it was an asteroid striking the Earth. But why? The normal argument is that when the president of the United States says something—whether he threatens war, as Trump did recently against Iran, or praises the winner of the World Series—it’s news. But so much of Trump’s Twitter fury is posturing, name-calling, bragging, transparent subject-changing—or simply revisiting a tired earlier theme (“witch hunt”; “no collusion”; “Build the Wall”)—that the nation can safely ignore it.


It’s not just the press that Trump captivates with his tweets. In his Fox News Channel town hall on Sunday, Pete Buttigieg—now a regular Trump Twitter target—described his attraction-repulsion for the president’s tweets. “It’s the nature of grotesque things that you can’t look away,” Buttigieg said.

I would never call for the press blackout of Trump’s tweets. If he’s threatening war on Twitter, I want to hear about it. But as the 2020 campaign gets underway, and his flurry of distractions really kicks into gear, journalists need a new approach.

For four years, and particularly since he took office, reporters have been treating Trump’s Twitter feed as akin to White House announcements—serious policy statements backed by the full force of his administration, the kind of thing you’d get called out if you ignore. Based on the copious record, though, we now know that’s rarely the case. His tweets are distractions, head-fakes, trial balloons. His presidency has been one long political campaign, a series of threats and promises designed more to capture attention than get anything done. Reporters would be doing their readers a service if they began to regard most of them not as presidential statements, but as campaign ads.

In practical terms, that means Trump’s tweets deserve demotion to a lower position in the news stream. The press should no more publish stories every time Trump tweets about tariffs any more than it should every time one of his campaign commercials airs.

Instead of rushing to write a piece every time Trump tweets, journalists should first ask themselves a few questions. Is the Trump tweet basically a campaign ruse? In other words, is it a campaign statement, a campaign promise, or some other campaign positioning presented in White House dressing? If so, give it a place in the 10th or 11th paragraph of the next story about his campaign. Is the Trump tweet designed primarily to gain press attention, like a new nickname for one of his opponents? Feel free to ignore it completely. Does it repeat one of his previous nutty tweets? Is it an accusation of treason; a charge of “fake news” with no evidence; the charge that Democrats are committing collusion? Does it include the words “witch hunt”? Print the tweets and spindle them for future reference. Did he tweet early in the morning? If he did, it’s a good chance it’s an empty response to a Fox & Friends segment.

Was the tweet designed to change the subject? This is a big one, since some of his most seemingly “newsworthy” tweets have a very specific purpose. As my colleague Gabby Orr has written, Trump routinely tweets something spicy to sidetrack the press corps’ attention from one of his political bruises. When his health care bill languished, he tweeted excitedly about Colin Kaepernick. When NBC News reported that Rex Tillerson, his own secretary of State, had referred to Trump as a moron, Trump tweeted about yanking NBC broadcast licenses. When the original Russian connection stories were published in 2017, he moved to change the subject by alleging in a tweet that President Obama had placed a “tapp” [sic] on his phones.

What needs to happen, heading into 2020, is for the press to resume its role as the dog, not the tail. For years it was media organizations, not politicians, that used their judgment to decide what is news. As political scientist John Zaller writes, politicians and their staffs work hard to craft messages in hopes that journalists will cover them and bring them to the attention of a mass audience—all those rallies, fact-finding trips, TV appearances, photo-ops and news releases are just gestures designed to get coverage, and journalists usually have well-honed instincts for dismissing the vast majority that are meaningless. But Trump cracked the system, lobbing his incendiary messages over their heads to the competing mass medium of Twitter, and ending their gatekeeper status. They may no longer be gatekeepers in the same way, but they don’t have to be mindless amplifiers. (I’m looking at you CNN, a network seemingly built entirely around fanning anxiety over Trump’s latest Twitter feint.)

The best authority on Trump’s tweets and how we should read them is probably Trump himself. In a Sunday interview with Fox News Channel’s Steve Hilton: “Twitter is really a typewriter for me,” Trump said. “It’s really not Twitter—it’s—Twitter goes on television, or if they have breaking news, I’ll tweet, I’ll say ‘Watch this—boom.’…If I put out a news release nobody’s even going to see it.”

And then: “[A]s soon as it goes out, it goes on television, it goes on Facebook, it goes all over the place and it’s instant—it really is, to me it’s a modern way to communicate.”

Trump’s tweets lose their allure the minute you remove them from their social media context and view them for what they are—news releases and pleas for attention and coverage delivered in a new container. They’re not news, they’re advertisement for himself. Let’s start treating them that way.

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Trump thinks of Twitter as a typewriter because he can’t use a computer. Send your typewritings to [email protected]. My email alerts have wrestled control over this forum from my Twitter feed. My RSS feed, a technological artifact of an earlier age, goes unnoticed, unloved, and unused.