The flurry of messages provides a case study of the ramifications of the president’s eager Twitter finger, from global markets to the darkest depths of the Internet.
President Trump waves as he and first lady Melania Trump depart from St. John's Episcopal Church in Washington on March 17. By Ashley Parker Ashley Parker White House reporter Email Bio Follow March 24 at 8:00 AM The first tweet came just after 11:50 a.m. last Saturday morning, and the final one landed at 10:04 p.m. the next evening.
But what impact did his outburst last weekend really have? If a president hunkers down in the White House to tweet alone, how much does it matter? “When he’s sending 34 tweets on a Sunday afternoon, he’s saying, ‘Which is the thing that can get everyone talking about me?’” said Nick Bilton, author of “Hatching Twitter,” an account of the site’s early years.
'I just want it open!' Clad in safety goggles and a gray suit, GM chief executive Mary Barra walked into the Orion Assembly Plant in Michigan Friday and announced an electric vehicle that was slated to be built abroad was instead coming to Michigan, along with 400 new jobs. Mary Barra, chief executive of GM, speaks at the GM Orion Assembly plant in Orion Township, Mich., on March 22. Trump’s corporate strong-arming has had mixed success. When Foxconn was about to abandon plans to open a facility in Wisconsin, Trump called the company, and suddenly the investment was back on, if still significantly smaller than once promised. Elsewhere, like Carrier in Indiana, large firms have gone ahead with layoffs despite pushback from Trump.
The company said Friday it would make a new electric vehicle at the Orion Assembly Plant as part of $1.8 billion in new investment in the United States in the coming years, about $1.4 billion of which had not been previously announced.The president praised Ford in a tweet Wednesday after it announced a nearly $1 billion investment in Michigan. For GM, there was only silence.'Bring back @JudgeJeanine Pirro' Trump is obsessed with Fox News.
Pirro is a longtime friend dating back to her days as a media-savvy district attorney in Westchester County. She and her then-husband ran in the same social circle as then-real estate developer Donald Trump. But the real power at the network resides with the opinion hosts — Hannity’s show is the highest-rated on the network, and even Pirro’s garners about 2 million viewers each Saturday. They can be divisive inside Fox. There was one view, voiced by a high-level insider, that Pirro is “a bit of an embarrassment,” given her outspoken comments.
In the end, though, Trump’s mere act of retweeting started a chain of events that would amplify one of the Web’s most pernicious conspiracy theories — much to its followers’ delight. “You can sneak a lot past his gatekeepers … simply by being loyal to him and expressing fidelity,” she said. “That opens him up then to these kinds of influence campaigns.”“What a glorious day for #WWG1WGA #Q,” the account tweeted a day later, using a hashtags referring to a popular QAnon phrase — “where we go one, we go all.”
That kicked off a week-long news cycle focused on the feud, with Trump getting asked about it while sitting next to the president of Brazil on Tuesday, venting his frustrations in front of the military crowd in Ohio on Wednesday, and ending the week by reiterating he was “not a fan” of McCain in an interview with Fox Business Network’s Maria Bartiromo on Friday.
“He’ll be fine,” said Mark Salter, a former longtime aide to McCain. “McCain died a much admired man, and he’ll be remembered a much admired man because he earned it.”'There should be no Mueller Report' One of Trump’s biggest targets during his weekend tweetstorm was one of his favorites — the Russia investigation overseen by Mueller, who transmitted his final report to the Justice Department on Friday.
Trump’s tweets were more of the same to some Democrats, who feel they have more important priorities now that the battle to release the report has begun.
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