The President of the United States is running his own 24/7 propaganda channel and you can tune in here: @realDonaldTrump. “The ratings are tremendous.”
Or actually, I guess that depends on what you mean by “tremendous.” If what you mean is that Donald Trump is worth something like $2 billion to Twitter, then yeah: “tremendous.” Recall this assessment from Monness Crespi Hardt’s James Cakmak:
Donald Trump’s presence on Twitter’s social media platform probably doesn’t affect user and revenue growth for the company but the stock could potentially lose as much as $2 billion in market capitalization if the president quit tweeting.
That, Cakmak imagines, would be the result of multiple compression “as investors revalue the company with the loss of its most prominent user, rather than a change in ‘monetizable; daily active users.”
Now if what we’re talking about is public perception of the President’s fitness to serve, well then the ratings are a long way from something that approximates “tremendous.” Over the course of the last month, he’s gone completely off the rails, tilting at all manner of windmills and imaginary foes including the Warriors’ Steph Curry, the Mayor of San Juan, Senators from his own party, and of course, the media.
In the wake of NBC’s tireless reporting on the “moron” saga, Trump threatened to try and pull their broadcast license, a threat which has drawn the ire of pretty much everyone and left the country even more incredulous than it was last week – no small feat, to be sure.
On Thursday evening, he was back at it, tweeting this:
Obviously, that is a step up on the “egregious-o-meter” because now he’s literally telling America to stop watching any kind of coverage that’s not favorable. The truly ironic part of the whole thing is that he’s calling NBC “FakeNews” (no spaces between the words and capitalized for no reason at all) when just last night he went on Sean Hannity and made a claim about the stock market that was so absolutely ridiculous it left the financial world wondering whether the clip was in fact real.
Well, you can bet Trump will be reconsidering his suggestion that NBC “may be worse than CNN” because earlier this evening, Erin Burnett said this:
As Pres. Trump signs a 50th executive order, @ErinBurnett labels him "hypocrite-in-chief" https://t.co/C5llh2vBCU https://t.co/ZuIkEXhEGs
— CNN (@CNN) October 12, 2017
Yes, “hypocrite-in-chief.” That should go over very well with a President who is quite clearly at wit’s end with everyone but Fox.
It’s worth noting (again) that Trump still hasn’t learned his lesson. The more he threatens the media, the worse this is going to get.
We’ll now sit back and wait to see what derisive nickname he comes up with for Erin.
