Trump’s Tweets

I got a bit worried over the past couple of days that some awful war was going to start. I wasn’t the only one who was getting worried. And in these days of fake news, how is one to know whether a war has started or not?

My solution: Read Donald Trump’s tweets.

Somebody Dirk wrote in the comments a few days ago that Trump can’t read. This is obviously untrue. What may be true, however, is that Trump doesn’t read much. I doubt that, come the end of the day, he climbs into bed with a mug of cocoa and carries on reading his John le Carré novel. Why should he, when he’s living in a John le Carré novel? Just this last Monday, neocon superhawk John Bolton became his latest National Security Advisor. Who writes this stuff? How much more fictional can you get?

Trump may not read much. But he writes lots. He writes every day. He posts up tweets on Twitter all the time.

Trump does what I do: he writes about what’s on his mind. He writes about what he’s thinking. He gets angry. He gets sad. I do too. And you can know what I’ve been thinking about and getting angry about because I’ll write about it.

But I’m a man of no importance. And Donald Trump is the President of the United States: the most powerful man in the world. And the most powerful man in the world posts tweets every day about what he’s thinking. Isn’t that remarkable! Isn’t that absolutely astonishing!

So yesterday I started reading Trump’s tweets. I wanted to know what Trump was thinking about. And yesterday he wasn’t thinking about Syria and Russia and WW3  (like I was). And so I figured that if he wasn’t thinking about it much, I shouldn’t either.

Donald Trump’s Twitter account is like a thermometer. It provides a daily reading – in fact several readings a day – of his temperature. If I was a world leader, I’d assign somebody to read every single one of Trump’s tweets, and analyse them closely.

Here are some of Trump’s Wednesday tweets:

Let’s analyse them. What’s he saying?

The first one says that any attack on Syria could be soon or not soon at all. And “not soon at all” might even be “never”. But the second two are about Russia. And he’s expressing regret that relations with Russia are so bad. He thinks there’s no reason for them to be that way. He wants nations to work together, not against each other. And then he goes on to pin the blame on the Mueller Russia Investigation. Is he wrong about that? It’s Mueller and the Democrats and the US MSM who’ve been screaming Russia! Russia! Russia! the whole damn time. Does that sound like someone who wants to go to war with anyone? No, it doesn’t.

Never mind QAnon whose cryptic posts get analysed by Jerome Corsi every day. Read Trump. Analyse Trump. There should be, by now, a whole academic discipline devoted to Trump tweets, complete with long dissertations about his choice of words.

I read somewhere recently that some of the generals surrounding Trump were trying to cut off his Twitter account. I can see why. How can you have the most powerful man in the world spilling the beans every day on what he’s thinking about? That’s an enormous hole in US national security, isn’t it? Maybe that’s why John Bolton has been brought in.

But I think Trump likes to tell people what he’s thinking. With a single tweet he can tell millions of people. No need for the MSM. He can go direct. And that’s what Trump’s base always likes about him: he says what he thinks. And he also writes what he thinks. Wouldn’t it be a good thing if a few other world leaders did the same? Then we’d have a little thermometer on Putin and Xi and Kim.

But not everyone writes about what they’re thinking. I’m one of the few people who do that. I’ve been doing it all my life. I find that putting things into words, with a pen, onto paper, somehow or other makes the thoughts more concrete. And it connects thoughts together. I write a journal every day, and I can read back through it and find what I’ve been thinking about, and what I thought about it. I can see where I changed my mind about something, or had a new idea – although this is increasingly difficult as my handwriting gets worse and worse (and my eyesight as well). And I do go back. Sometimes I want to know what I was thinking, because I can’t remember.

And I think that Trump’s tweets serve the same purpose as my journal. But they’re shorter and terser than my rambling journal. And more easily readable. And I can well imagine that they’ll all be published one day, with accompanying analyses and commentaries.

I think Trump’s tweets are a beacon of candour – of transparency – in a world where people are increasingly being disallowed from thinking anything and saying anything and writing anything that isn’t Politically Correct. Trump is a transparent man. He wears his heart on his sleeve. We see him warts and all. Everybody else is in disguise.

And I think Trump’s tweets are a sort of public service. They provide an important window onto someone working in public life. And perhaps his example is getting more people to do the same thing. Although I can imagine that a lot of people would find it very hard to write even a single tweet. Me, for example. I’m never that terse. I don’t do terse.

I’m the kind of guy who can write entire blog posts about tweets. i.e. I can write a helluva lot about a helluva little.

But I think you knew that already.