By Staff Writer Sawyer Pollitt.
Twitter is the one social media platform that has successfully bridged the gap between the famous and the run-of-the-mill. On Twitter, celebrities and politicians are thrown into the same pool as the common man. Due to this phenomenon, Twitter is the perfect platform for our 45th president, Donald J. Trump to take aim with his opinions and fire them off into the ether.
On October 27th, 2018, Trump once again hopped on the saddle of the great Twitter machine and said this, “Watching the Dodgers/Red Sox final innings. It is amazing how a manager takes out a pitcher who is loose & dominating through almost 7 innings, Rich Hill of Dodgers, and brings in nervous reliever(s) who get shellacked. 4 run lead gone. Managers do it all the time, big mistake!” Clearly a simple, unoffensive sports related tweet. For Donald Trump, not bad.
However, because these words came straight from the fingers of Trump, they of course caused outrage. Many were calling the tweet inappropriate. Following a week of tragedy where innocent American citizens were gunned down in their place of worship, those who took issue with this tweet said that Trump should be focusing on the issues, not the World Series. One Pittsburgh resident had this to say, “As a guy living in Pittsburgh, let me just ask: is watching the World Series really the best use of your time this evening?”
Normally, there shouldn’t be a problem with voicing one’s opinion on the state of the World Series. Any person is entitled to their opinion, especially concerning sports. Trump, although being the president, and a controversial one at that, is still a man who is allowed to have opinions.
This tweet was strangely mundane as far as Trump tweets go, it didn’t incite violence, dabble in problematic terms, or spout any kind of nonsense whatsoever. If celebrities and athletes are allowed to have their voice be heard regarding politics and policy, so too should politicians have their voices be heard about sports.
One of the problems with this tweet arises from the fact that Donald Trump’s official twitter account can be considered to be official presidential correspondence. According to former White House press secretary Sean Spicer “The President is the President of the United States, so they’re considered official statements by the President of the United States,”.
Throughout his presidency, Trump has used Twitter as a direct line of communication between himself and the world. At this point, @realDonaldTrump is not a personal account, this is not Donald Trump’s finsta. If Trump wants to treat his Twitter account and all of the messages he sends and tweets as official, he needs to act like it all the time.
It is not a situation where he can pick and choose when to be “on” so to speak. If one day he tweets “Just had a long and very good conversation with President Xi Jinping of China. We talked about many subjects, with a heavy emphasis on Trade.” it is frankly in bad taste if he uses the same account, with the same authority, to talk about sports when he should be addressing more pressing issues.
However, as with many of the relatively minor political issues that are facing us right now, such as this problematic World Series tweet, we are faced with our own issue of whether we should put our time and energy toward caring about them. When there are genuine problems in the world, it may do some good to focus on more pressing situations than what the president thinks about plays made in the World Series.