Hillary Clinton, the New York Times and Mexico are in. Stormy Daniels, Vladimir Putin and Stephon Clark – not so much.



Donald Trump’s tweetstorms frequently set the day’s political weather as they castigate foes, rattle diplomatic alliances, polarise debate on cable news, employ legions of fact checkers and generate questions for the White House that are usually met with the flat answer: “The president’s tweets speak for themselves.”

But while all this consumes huge attention and energy, the president’s silences speak for themselves, too. His Twitter feed, a grimly fascinating window into his consciousness with an assist from Fox News, has conspicuous blind spots that may indicate his deepest insecurities or prejudices.

“Trump is so vocal about what he likes and dislikes – so present in the national conversation – that his omissions are often more revealing than his comments,” Jamelle Bouie, chief political correspondent, wrote at Slate. “On the rare occasions when this president is silent, it is consistently when confronted with violence against nonwhites.”

Bouie highlighted how the shooting of Clark, an unarmed black man killed in his grandmother’s back yard by police in Sacramento, California, had gone unremarked upon by Trump and been brushed off by the White House as a matter for “the local authorities”.

This contrasts with the president’s Twitter assaults on prominent African Americans such as Barack Obama (“perhaps the worst president in the history of the United States!”), the congressman John Lewis (“All talk, talk, talk – no action or results”), the congresswoman Frederica Wilson (“Wacky”), the football player Colin Kaepernick (“YOU’RE FIRED”) and the CNN journalist Don Lemon (“dumb as a rock”).

Future historians will find on Twitter alone plenty of evidence to support the view of Trump as one of America’s most racially divisive presidents, even before they turn to his verbal criticism of the congresswoman Maxine Waters as a “low IQ individual” and his mealy mouthed comments about white supremacists who marched in Charlottesville, Virginia.

Trump’s reluctance to tweet about Daniels, a pornographic film actor who alleges that she was paid to hush up an extramarital affair, is especially striking. For once his fighter’s instinct to punch back has been suspended, perhaps on the advice of lawyers, perhaps because the issue is uniquely sensitive in the Trump household.

There appeared to be similar legal constraints on the president’s tweeting about the special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into alleged collusion with Russia, but last month he invoked Mueller by name for the first time. This was taken as further evidence of Trump now cutting loose, following his instincts and paying less heed to a dwindling band of advisers.

As for Russia’s president, Putin has received scarce attention since Trump tweeted in December 2016: “I always knew he was very smart!” Despite the poisoning of Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia in Salisbury in the UK, and Washington’s expulsion of Russian diplomats, the president has spent more tweets assailing the actor Alec Baldwin than Putin.

Anyone who relied solely on Trump’s tweets for news would find precious little about the humanitarian crises in South Sudan, Syria or Yemen, but they would learn plenty about the value of opinion polls and TV ratings. When hundreds of thousands of people marched in Washington and other cities last month to demand tougher gun control measures, Trump, who was at his Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida, did not tweet.

And what of those solemn moments when a graceful intervention is called for? When Stephen Hawking died last month, Barack Obama tweeted a photo of himself meeting the British astrophysicist with the words: “Have fun out there among the stars.” From Trump, nothing.

He was at it again on Twitter from 6.34am on Tuesday, blasting “Fake News Networks”, the CNN president, Jeff Zucker (whom he called “Little Jeff Zuker”), “Cheatin’ Obama”, and Amazon, which he claimed was costing the US Postal Service vast amounts of money. But will he spare a tweet for Wednesday’s 50th anniversary of the assassination of Martin Luther King?