Saturday, June 14, 2025

I Don’t Think Much Of Social Media As A Political Tool

 Just ask The Lincoln Project how effective they were in keeping Trump out of office a second time. And most people claiming Democrats would win if only they’d abandon legacy media, have a stake in on-line media.

Nobody thinks Trump won because of Truth Social. More and more I think it’s clear Kamala Harris lost because she’s a black woman. Trump was the most appallingly bad political candidate in my memory (and my memory includes George McGovern, an incredibly decent man who only carried one state against Nixon’s re-election. And it wasn’t his home state.). People were not that overwhelmingly worried about the price of eggs.

I mention this because I want to praise Gov. Newsom’s use of Twitter. He’s not going to win any election by it, but Trump thinks he can run the country on his social platform. So Newsom is fighting Trump on his own terms, and showing the rest of us how to do it. Trump is successful because people accept his verbal belligerence (the way of the bully). Newsom doesn’t, and he diminishes Trump every day with tweets like this (the way to defeat the bully):

Diminishing Comer in the process is just lagniappe.

Not that releasing the transcript would be Trump’s silver bullet. But anything that even threatens to start the conversation about Trump’s mental decay is a welcome opportunity. Yes, the media follows elections returns and favors the GOP narrative. But when there’s blood in the water:
They can be turned. Slowly, but they follow their audience, too.

And Newsom isn’t even letting the White House have the “but violence!” argument.
I mean, the most Trump’s militarization has done is prove LA is not a war zone. If it was so dangerous to get downtown, what was this guy doing there? And did police arrest him, or just tell him the building was closed to the public until further notice? My guess is, trying to enter a federal building is not a crime. So what justified the detention?

This is not the royal road to victory. But it a damned sight better than fretting about what nickname Trump might give you. And it challenges reporting on that particular, weird trait as if it were just Trump being Trump, rather than a man in his 8th decade behaving like an 8th grader.

You gotta start somewhere, with something more effective than clever ads that please the people who made them.
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