by: Liam Edgar
President Donald Trump, never one known for his humility, ended 2020 with a boast – and one well deserved.
“Finished off the year with the highest Stock Market in history,” the president said 76 minutes before the calendar rolled over to 2021.
“Setting records with your 401k’s, just like I said you would. Congratulations to all!”
Wall Street thrived – and the more than 55 percent of Americans who own stock also benefited – despite the crushing lockdowns implemented during the pandemic.
Yet that wasn’t the only record set last year.
Trump’s tweet promoting the stock market was his final one of 2020, and according to Newsweek, the president set a personal record for tweeting over the past 12 months.
Between Jan. 1, 2020, and Dec. 31, 2020, Trump’s thumbs pumped harder than Lance Armstrong’s feet after he injected his special cocktail of testosterone, HGH, EPO, and cortisone.
Trump fired off 12,234 tweets or retweets last year.
That slammed his previous best, achieved in 2019, of 7,783 – an increase of 57 percent. In fact, Trump’s output in 2020 topped his combined tweeting total for 2018 and 2019.
In fact, Newsweek offered a stat that was quite revealing, surprising, and perhaps disturbing to the liberals, #NeverTrumpers and even a few regular conservatives whose main beef about the president was that he couldn’t keep his thumbs holstered.
The data – offered in a graph that looked eerily like a coronavirus case-count chart – showed that as a candidate and early in his term, Trump carried a fraction of the social media presence that he demonstrated later. Around this time, four years ago, the president was issuing roughly 150 to 200 tweets a month.
By the end of last year, his monthly output was five or six times that amount.
Readers at this point may be asking: who cares? Or why is this important?
Well, there are a couple of reasons.
For one, President Trump has redefined how the president will communicate with the American people. That depends largely on how his predecessors behave.
But Trump made it clear that the president no longer needs televised Oval Office addresses or lengthy media interviews.
With a mechanism like Twitter, as Trump repeatedly showed, a future president can make his (or her) point instantaneously, personally (to each user), and in an easily digestible format.
The second reason this matters is that Trump had to do this.
As we’ve seen over the past four years, the national media saw themselves as part of “The Resistance,” rather than humble gatherers and disseminators of facts.
With the media’s filter fine-tuned to promote their own agenda and censor info that would benefit Trump or portray him in a positive light, the president had no choice but to attempt to go over their heads and directly to his 88.5 million Twitter followers, and the rest of the American people.
The downside is that Big Tech has put its thumb – and a couple of extra fingers – on the scale to benefit liberals.
Since the Newsweek piece focused on Twitter, that company’s CEO Jack Dorsey showed he is just as nimble and aggressive in slanting the story to the left as CNN President Jeff Zucker or MSNBC’s Phil Griffin.
Conservatives must continue to overcome that impediment even without Trump. But perhaps the lesson from Trump’s record-setting social media campaign in 2020 is that a hammer has just one function: keep hammering.