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https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-trump-tweets-1491434092" The Trump Tweets "
" Twitter helped Trump win the White House. Now it may cause him to lose it. "
By DANIEL HENNINGER
" Asked during an interview with the Financial Times whether he regretted any of his tweets, President Trump said, “I don’t regret anything.” He said Twitter is part of the reason he made it to the White House and on balance the tweeting is worth it: “You know if you issue hundreds of tweets, and every once in a while you have a clinker, that’s not so bad.”
Mr. Trump’s deputy press secretary, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, complained on “Fox News Sunday” that the media’s coverage doesn’t reflect the reality of the new presidency: “The media constantly wants to talk about something that doesn’t exist instead of something that does.” She said, “We’ve spent the last couple of months doing major policy initiatives and rollouts in the forms of executive orders, rolling back regulations, creating an environment where businesses are confident in hiring again.”
All of this is true, not least Mr. Trump’s belief that Twitter helped him into the Oval Office. Back then, Mr. Trump’s tweets drew free-media attention to himself and his shoestring campaign. The tweets destabilized his opponents, notably Hillary Clinton, who over-focused on him at the expense of her own message. The tweets rallied the Trump base and held it together when he had virtually no ground game. In the campaign, the tweets produced a positive outcome.
In his presidency, though, Mr. Trump’s tweets are producing the opposite result. They have become presidential speed bumps.
This time, the tweets are drawing attention to himself as a president in permanent tension with two major American institutions: the U.S. press and the intelligence community. His furious, highly charged tweets about them produced a reaction. Both institutions are now in active opposition to his presidency, especially the media.
The ancient advice, “don’t pick fights with people who buy ink by the barrel,” is still true. The media—print, television, the web—buy time with the public by the petabyte. Every Trump tweet produces media pushback as negative coverage or snark at an overwhelmingly anti-Trump ratio.
Tweeting “Sleepy Eyes Chuck Todd” incentivizes every decision-maker at NBC to put anti-Trump reporting at the top of its hourly-news budget across the network. Where is the upside?
Mr. Trump has many sympathizers in his fight with the media. But for every president back to Lyndon Johnson, this is like waging battle with the tides. Repetitive negative publicity on this scale will suppress the Trump message and agenda.
Mr. Trump has a point about the media’s microscopic coverage of the Russia collusion story and its disinterest in the Obama White House’s abuses of U.S. intelligence. But the intensity of his tweets against the failing New York Times , the dishonest Washington Post and CNN’s fake news is mainly increasing audience size and political market share for the media’s version of these events.
The campaign tweeting destabilized Mr. Trump’s Republican primary opponents. The presidential tweeting is destabilizing people who are on his side—in Congress, in the government and in the military.
The Trump “change” presidency, running hard on multiple fronts, was inevitably going to produce a big Beltway counteroffensive. The tweets disrupt the momentum of the people who are executing his plans and his legislative agenda.
The Trump White House doesn’t put much stock in the Gallup poll’s daily tracking of the president’s approval rating, but its fall below 40% is almost entirely the result of public anxiety driven by negative static.
As former presidents know, falling steadily downward in public approval causes some House members and senators to distance themselves from the White House. With so many hard votes coming up, that small distance could determine whether he wins or loses.
After the election, the Democrats were confused and on defense. The political storms erupting after Mr. Trump’s tweet storms have energized the defeated Democrats, whose candidates are raising hundreds of thousands of dollars for 2018 from small donors on the internet.
During the primaries, the Trump base emerged as a solid 30%. It will never abandon him. But as president, the arena of battle—on taxes, spending and infrastructure—has moved unavoidably to Washington, where the Trump base is a less potent factor.
Mr. Trump is right. Twitter helped him win the presidency. But the net-negative effects of the president’s tweets are eroding his chances for success in Washington, where every victory is won at the margin.
The president should step back from tweeting and assemble a professional, Trumpian team to handle his public relations. If his presidency fails, historians of the Trump presidency will record that Twitter raised him up, and Twitter brought him down.
***
Correction: Last week’s column stated that Republican Rep. John Faso of New York signaled his intention to vote against the Trump health-care reform bill. The good news is that Mr. Faso, who defeated progressive Zephyr Teachout in 2016, stood his ground and publicly supported the bill. "