I made the same argument to Josh Marshall of TPM yesterday - that, as crazy as it may seem, the press needs to stop reacting to Trump’s tweets. Yeah, he’s the President, yeah, reporting what the President says and does is your job… I get that. But, really, after seeing every damn network news show start talking about JFK… they just need to stop. Ignore the guy.
Hell, an overall ban on what people said on Twitter would improve news quality 20%. It’s just lazy journalism.
How much attention is the right amount? Who determines which tweets require attention and which do not?
I don’t argue that the fucking orange moron tweets inane shit that is barely intelligible, let alone news worthy. But what I believe bears constant vigilance is acceptance and normalization of this behaviour. Ignoring him will only serve to make his pathological lies go unchallenged and acceptable. That is something we cannot ever allow.
It’s tricky. I think he posts a lot of this crap precisely because it gets him the attention he craves. If he posts the truth, no one will respond or care. When he posts lies, the Left goes berserk and draws enormous attention to him, and the Right kicks in and defends him, dragging the whole thing out ad nauseum.
Daft Twerp tweets, like every syllable he garbles, should be universally ignored. We know he’s lying and trolling, he knows he’s lying and trolling, stop sending him billy goats. Don’t give him the attention he craves.
But that won’t happen, because the attention sells advertising space, which is why the Loofah-faced Shit Gibbon is president. Everyone loves watching a train wreck, carnage be damned.