Media Should Pay Trump to Tweet

By Holman W. Jenkins Jr.,

He delights in making us dance to tunes he wantonly types out in the wee hours.

Countless Trump supporters have approached me and said with a sigh that they wish the president would stop tweeting. I’ve never heard a Democrat express a wish that Mr. Trump would stop tweeting.

Don’t expect me to join the quivering faux outrage over his latest un-bon mot. Two words, “go back,” in the middle of his 121-word tweet storm apparently directed at the radical Democratic House clique of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Rashida Tlaib, Ilhan Omar and Ayanna Pressley don’t strike me as the racist trope his partisan enemies insist. Yes, they echo bigoted words heard many times by foreign tourists and immigrants. Of course there’s also the countervailing trope: Decades ago on a street in Istanbul a man came up to me and shouted, “Yankee go home and take me with you.” And then he laughed.

And yet don’t we still get the impression Mr. Trump is actually directing all this? I urged early and often that he stop tweeting. But I must admit there is something compelling and finally instructive about the apparent ease with which he elicits ritualized behavior from our media. An unexpected revelation of the Trump era has been just how nonplused and ready to go all herdlike our pundit class is when confronted (for once) with something genuinely interesting, novel and antic to analyze—which the Trump phenomenon surely is.

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