“The president ignored Trump’s distraction for two years and remained focused on the message he wanted to deliver, and it paid off with a landslide victory,” a White House official said in a statement to POLITICO on Wednesday. “Whether Trump moves into public view again or opens a Parler account is not going to make a difference in the way we communicate with the American people.”
But even if the strategy had remained the same, Biden’s team also admits that the absence of Trump and his Twitter feed was a pleasant addition to the job.
“Didn’t you tweet a new one every hour?” They feel blessed, ”said an external adviser.
Indeed, Twitter’s suspension of Trump’s account appears to have re-aligned the political universe and kept distractions and interruptions to a minimum, as the broader conversation played out on Biden’s agenda. Trump was not there to demand a popular uprising against Biden’s federal masked uniform. His Twitter megaphone did not highlight the loss of construction jobs that could arise when Biden ended the Keystone XL pipeline project. Trump does not call Biden a ‘loser’ for his vaccination plans for Covid-19, or attack Anthony Fauci as a failure he had to fire when the country’s leading infectious disease expert spoke out about how difficult it was for scientists to to act in Trump. administration.
“It has become very clear since his absence on Twitter how much Trump has driven a media narrative,” said Paul Bentz, a Republican strategist and opinion pollster in Arizona.
Biden still received a constant stream of criticism during his short time. But nothing came close to getting caught up in the gravity of Trump’s Twitter stream, which had the ability to move markets again within hours, upset officials and tear up news circles.
“Trump has had an incredible ability to divert attention from issues. He could plant seeds of doubt across entire institutions and regular democratic processes, ”said Philip N. Howard, director of the Oxford Internet Institute, which studies the social sciences of the Internet. ‘By letting him off Twitter, the conversation about climate change can remain the subject – and about evidence. The discussion on race and social inequality can remain focused on policy ideas. ”
“He was a kind of sinkhole in the media ecosystem,” Howard continued, “which often trapped professional journalists for covering silly stories or simply burned out as individuals.”
While Trump’s absence from Twitter was a gift to Biden early on, it could also benefit the IDP. Republicans have been pleading with the former president for years to show the rhetoric and allow the Democrats to be judged by their own actions, rather than allow an outrageous Trump tweet to overshadow anything else during the day. Now that he’s off the platform, the party could potentially run a coordinated, coherent campaign against the current president.
“Be careful what you do,” said Sam Nunberg, who served as a consultant on Trump’s campaign in 2016 before being fired. Nunberg said of Biden and the crises facing the country: ‘The focus is now on him and it has not been on him yet. … He owns it now. ‘
Recent evidence, however, suggests that Biden will benefit from Trump’s Twitter eclipse as a whole. The former president has long taken on a role as an opposition opponent, especially a decade ago when he cited the weight of the nutrition staff under former President Barack Obama and asked if the 44th president was born in the United States. Initially, Obama saw Trump as a background noise that was not worth responding to, as he wrote in his 2020 memoir, ‘A Promised Land’.
But as national media gave Trump a platform – leading oxygen to an unfounded allegation – it forced Obama’s hand. The then president finally issued his lengthy birth certificate and immediately read the media to build an effort built on racist undertones. After Trump’s conspiracy of birds disappeared, he turned to devastation in the midst of a global health crisis. When the Ebola epidemic in West Africa surfaced, Trump chased and harassed the Obama administration on Twitter, questioning whether it could curb the disease and warning that widespread spread could come to America.
In one tweet, Trump complained that he chose ‘lobbyist and political hack’ – and the current White House chief of staff – Ron Klain as his Ebola tsar. In another, Trump said of Klain: ‘zero experience in the medical field and zero experience in controlling infectious diseases. A TOTAL TOMB! He mocked Obama for playing golf and a second guess a decision to fly American doctors from Africa back to the homeland.
For the Obama team, it was deeply disruptive and hampered his efforts to manage the situation.
“Many of the fears that gripped this country, specifically in October and November in 2014, were fueled by Trump’s tweets,” Klain said in an interview with POLITICO last year.
Klain is eventually applauded for averting an Ebola outbreak in the US, but Trump did not pay a price. Less than three years later, he was president.
Eric Schultz, who was at Obama’s White House during the Ebola outbreak, said that even when Trump is away from Twitter, there remain obstacles for Biden – the top of which is a deeply divided Congress and country.
“Let us not pretend that this is an unobstructed runway for him.” Schultz said. “This idea that Biden is not facing a strong headwind is stupid.”
But other Democrats are more optimistic about what the Trump-less social media landscape envisions. John Anzalone, a pollster who worked for both Biden and Obama, said that since Trump was subdued, Americans are likely to feel a sense of relief – a kind of recovery. Anzalone said it fell on the media to allow Trump to continue to play an extraordinary place in today’s dialogue, given the violence that erupted after the riots in the Capitol.
“Would the press still report what he says?” When does it end? When does his criticism become irrelevant? “At one point it was just an angry citizen, former president,” Anzalone said. “I do not think it will change anything that the Biden government is doing. They just put their head down and get things done. ”