No president in the modern era has been more successful at shaping and manipulating the news cycle. Just take the Mueller report.
Having spent the past two years studying the president’s rhetoric and, in particular, his use of Twitter, I know that Donald Trump’s tweets typically serve one of three purposes: dissembling, distracting, and discrediting. These aims, of course, are not mutually exclusive, and the president frequently communicates in ways that incorporate all three. Collectively, these three strategies make the president a master of misdirection.
President Trump’s greatest rhetorical magic trick, however, has been to create the illusion that he won the Presidency of the United States without the aid of the Russian government. To be clear, I am not questioning the president’s legitimacy. It would take an exceptionally small, petty, and insecure person to challenge the legitimacy of a duly-elected president. I do not dispute that Trump earned the requisite number of votes in the Electoral College to win the 2016 US presidential election.
The sheer number of times, more than 150 on Twitter alone, that the president pressed the matter of no collusion, the more intently the public looked at—and only at—collusion. “Did the president collude with Russia?” everyone asked. They asked this precisely because the president repeatedly, obsessively insisted he did not. This was misdirection.
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