McCaskill and Trump: Two different universes on Twitter
WASHINGTON • To Donald Trump, Twitter is not a place for niceties about senators and representatives or for saccharine shout-outs to friends, except for “FOX and Friends.”
For the president, Twitter is a scorched-earth, take-no-prisoners medium to criticize former adviser-turned- witness “Sloppy Steve” Bannon; “Dicky Durbin,” the senator from Illinois who has been both an enemy and negotiator with Trump during the government shutdown, and others who get CAPITAL LETTERS attention from the president.
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Cynthia Dill, a former state legislator in Maine who was the unsuccessful Democratic nominee for Senate in 2012, follows both Trump and McCaskill on Twitter. In 2013, she tweeted “um, senator, that’s gross,” when McCaskill posted a photo of a pig she was roasting for her son’s birthday.
McCaskill got vegan criticism for that tweet, but the tone "seem(s) quaint by today's standards set by the president who scarfs down two cheeseburgers, a couple of fish fillets and a chocolate shake in bed on a regular basis,” Dill said this month.
“I do still follow Sen. McCaskill on Twitter and believe she does a good job with the platform blending her personal and political life,” Dill said. “More importantly, she appears to recognize the limits of social media when it comes to governing."
A FOX News poll released last summer said that 71 percent of respondents thought Trump’s tweets hurt him. Later that day, either by coincidence or to deflect from the poll, Trump sent out a tweet calling friends-turned-critics Mika Brzezinski, “Crazy Mika,” and Joe Scarborough, “Psycho Joe.”
The “Morning Joe” hosts on MSNBC had something to talk about for days. The New York Post the next day ran what may have been the shortest editorial ever, aimed at Trump’s tweets: “Stop, just stop.”
Hanson, a conservative commentator and senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, again urged Trump to tone it down.
"I would urge the president to stop tweeting about nothings and to keep his powder dry for bigger game to come than Joe and Mika," Hanson wrote after that "Morning Joe" dustup.
"But considering that I have been urging just such pruning of tweets as a matter of strategy for Trump for a long time and that I have been mostly wrong about the downsides of his Twitter invective for just as long, perhaps the president knows something I don’t," he said.