ACO’s Instagram is also awesome.
In addition to every other reason she’s awesome, add: She’s the poster person for why Congress needs new blood. Besides mass corruption, the House is also getting a little too old and decrepit.
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Unfortunately, it doesn’t work that way. Trump’s statements on Twitter are as impactful on the world stage and the US economy as if he was making daily announcements on the radio, hourly TV broadcasts, or sending out press releases. I know people whose job it is to monitor his Twitter feed and send out alerts to Wall St analysts, because one word about a company can tank or lift their shares. The question is whether Twitter should be providing such a massive unfiltered platform for him.
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What doesn’t work, which way? When you’re done typing, go back and check what I said to be sure I advocated it.
Ignoring the president. Thanks. I can read.
Um. Okay. I’m explaining why it’s not feasible for Americans and the press, en masse, to ignore the President’s Twitter account, as you’re suggesting. As others have. I completely agree that it’s bad for America. It’s sad that we can’t.
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As I’m not suggesting:
[Emphasis added]
It’s the utter mundane endless exegesis of every single utterance, no matter how repetitive or even benign.
If he tweets “Happy thanksgiving to all” it makes it into news articles. Go ahead, look it up, but it’s not like you don’t believe me. Only the most histrionic analysis of everything Trump says means that literally every tweet must be shared in the mainstream media. I think we could have let that one go. Maybe it doesn’t need to be shared. At what point are news articles just amplifiers for everything he says that his base eats up regardless of how negative the coverage is? Right now, I could probably read every single tweet he writes just by reading the news.
If I search Fox News for Obama’s thanksgiving tweets from 2014 to 2016, I don’t see any mention. Meanwhile I can type the text of basically any Trump tweet into Google and find something about it in a mainstream news source. I obviously didn’t Google them all, but holy shit, at least some of what he says is not new, and therefore not news to us. We’re fucking rehashing typos a year later. I mean it was good for a laugh, but… really?
So maybe it’s not entirely ridiculous that I’ve reached the conclusion that maybe not literally all of this coverage is essential and may, in fact be egging on a following that doesn’t need egging on. The press is parroting r/TheDonald in discussing every single tweet. This level of morbid fascination is not harmless. If someone wants to watch his tweets for stock speculation instead of monitoring whale song (as if stock speculators have a reputation for completely scientific approaches to the market), god bless. If someone wants to make a hobby out of responding to literally every single Trump Tweet, great. But I see no value come out of the press’s current obsessive level of coverage. Where’s the correlation to anything useful or positive?
Meanwhile there’s plenty even in academic analyses that point to a very real connection between his driving the news cycle, free media attention from the press, and his winning the 2016 elections. Why would that fail to apply to the next election? What could his opponent possibly do to get anywhere near that level of attention? I’m not saying he’s going to win, but gun to my head, right now, with things as they currently are? I would not bet my life on him losing as I would on his opponent doing the same. That analysis is in no small part based on this.
By all means report on his substantive actions and his most alarming statements, I’m not talking about shutting him out completely, and the only way to get that out of my statements is if you don’t read the parts where I make clear that’s not what I’m saying.
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I’m entirely agreeing with you. Yes, absolutely, I wish we didn’t have the obsessive coverage of his every typo. But when every tweet might be a toilet-tweet brain-fart about nachos or might be a declaration of war, I can entirely understand why the press sweats over everything he says. And when his tweets can tank a business with just a few sentences, I understand why there’s Wall Street folks waiting for every dumb utterance. I would have hoped we’d have learned by now that 99% of what he says is BS.
I think it’s very bizarre that the President has 100% unfiltered access to be able to make announcements like this 24/7. Maybe one day leadership at Twitter will change and Trump will have to move to Gab or Instagram. I can certainly hope!
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A little too ironic that a post about Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has devolved into a discussion all about Trump and the need to ignore him.
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