“The president spent two years ignoring Trump’s distractions and staying focused on the message he wanted to get across, and it paid off with an impressive victory,” a White House official said in a statement to POLITICO on Wednesday. “Whether Trump reappears publicly or not 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 work he is doing.
“Not having to deal with a new disturbed tweet every hour? They feel blessed, ”said an external consultant.
In fact, the suspension of Trump’s Twitter account seems to realign the political universe, minimizing deviations and interruptions as the broader conversation about Biden’s agenda unfolds. Trump was not there to demand a popular uprising against Biden’s federal mask-wearing mandate. His Twitter megaphone was not promoting the loss of construction jobs that could occur when Biden closes the Keystone XL pipeline project. Trump was not calling Biden a “loser” for his vaccination plans with Covid-19, or attacking Anthony Fauci as a failure he should have triggered when the country’s leading infectious disease specialist talked about how difficult it was for scientists to operate in the Trump administration.
“It was pretty clear, since his absence on Twitter, how much Trump was directing a media narrative,” said Paul Bentz, an Arizona-based Republican strategist and researcher.
Biden still faced a steady stream of criticism during his short term in office. But nothing came close to getting caught up in the gravitational pull of Trump’s Twitter feed, which had the ability to move markets, dismiss jobs and destroy news cycles over and over again in a matter of hours.
“Trump had an incredible ability to distract himself from problems. He was able to plant seeds of doubt about entire institutions and regular democratic processes, ”said Philip N. Howard, director of the Oxford Internet Institute, which studies the social sciences of the Internet. “Having it outside of Twitter allows the conversation about climate change to stay on topic – and the evidence. The conversation about race and social inequality can focus on policy ideas ”.
“He was a kind of drain on the media ecosystem,” continued Howard, “who often arrested professional journalists in covering futile stories or simply burned them as individuals.”
While Trump’s absence from Twitter was a gift to Biden from the start, it could also end up benefiting the GOP. For years, Republicans have pleaded with the ex-president to soften the rhetoric and allow Democrats to be tried for their own actions, rather than allowing an outrageous tweet from Trump to obscure anything else during the day. Now that he has left the platform, the party may well have a coordinated and cohesive campaign against the current president.
“Be careful what you want,” said Sam Nunberg, who served as a 2016 consultant on the Trump campaign before he was fired. Nunberg said of Biden and the crises facing the nation: “The whole focus is now on him and not on him. … He is the owner now. “
Still, recent evidence suggests that Biden will benefit in conjunction with Trump’s blackout on Twitter. The ex-president has long assumed the role of chief antagonist, especially for a decade, when he pushed the question of the birth of former President Barack Obama, questioning whether the 44th president was born in the United States. Initially, Obama saw Trump as a background noise that was not worth an answer, as he wrote in his 2020 memoirs, “A Promised Land”.
But as the national media gave Trump a platform – fueling an oxygen-unfounded claim – that forced Obama. The then president ended up publishing his long-form birth certificate and promptly lectured the media in an effort based on racist tones. After Trump’s birth conspiracy languished, he went on to create confusion in the midst of a global health crisis. When the Ebola epidemic broke out in West Africa, Trump harassed and harassed the Obama administration on Twitter, doubting its ability to contain the disease and warning that a massive spread could reach America.
In a tweet, Trump criticized Obama for choosing “lobbyist and political hacker” – and current White House chief of staff – Ron Klain as his Ebola czar. In another, Trump said of Klain: “zero experience in the medical field and zero experience in the control of infectious diseases. A TOTAL JOKE! ”He scoffed at Obama for playing golf and guessed the decision to take American doctors from Africa back to his country.
For the Obama team, it was deeply disturbing and complicated his efforts to manage the situation.
“Many of the fears that plagued this country, specifically in October and November 2014, were sparked by Trump’s tweets,” Klain told POLITICO in an interview last year.
In the end, Klain was applauded for preventing an Ebola outbreak in the United States. But Trump did not pay the price. Less than three years later, he was president.
Eric Schultz, who was at the Obama White House during Ebola, said that even with Trump’s departure from Twitter, the obstacles remain for Biden – the top of which is a country and a deeply divided Congress.
“We are not going to pretend that there is a clear lead here for him.” Schultz said. “This idea that Biden does not face strong headwinds is silly.”
But other Democrats are more optimistic about what the non-Trump social media landscape has in store. John Anzalone, a researcher who worked for both Biden and Obama, said that as Trump was silenced, Americans are probably feeling a sense of relief – a kind of reboot. Anzalone said it would be up to the media to allow Trump to still play a disproportionate role in today’s dialogue, given the violence that erupted after the Capitol riots.
“Would the press still be reporting what he says? When does it end? When does your criticism become irrelevant? At some point, he is just an angry citizen, former president, ”said Anzalone. “I don’t think it would change anything that the Biden government is doing. They’re just ducking their heads and doing things. ”