US President Donald Trump’s failure to immediately condemn the racist violence in Charlottesville and the murder of an anti-racist protestor has produced widespread anger. The truth is that the president has made a rod for his own back by his regular and often provocative instant tweets on anything and everything. But on Saturday after a racist drove a car into a crowd of counter-demonstrators assembled to voice their opposition to a far-right rally in the Virginian city, killing a 32-year-old woman Heather Heyer and injuring 19 others, Trump’s Twitter account stayed silent.
The president has troubles enough with the liberal establishment and even members of his Republican party all snapping at his heels day and night over every last thing he does. It was a major folly to gift them a legitimate cause for outrage by ignoring this disgusting crime committed in the name of the unacceptable minority of white supremacists.
The predictable cry has gone up that Trump stayed silent because the Ku Klux Klan and their bigoted ilk constitute the president’s core support base. This is however rubbish. The votes of 62,984,825 American citizens last year were Trump’s support base. This was the majority of an electorate who had become sick and tired of the futile and destructive machinations of the cynical Washington political establishment, epitomized by the different posturing of his rival Hillary Clinton, who changed her “convictions” depending on her audience and lied shamelessly about her past.
Trump’s constant megaphone diplomacy is fraught with risks. He has created the expectation that he will quickly tweet a comment on anything that concerns him. But there are two obvious problems here. The first is simply that more often than not, it is no easy matter to produce a considered and nuanced comment in 140 characters or less. The second, as the president has discovered after Charlottesville, is that if he does not react immediately on an issue of popular concern, his silence is deafening.
Trump is actually only the most outstanding example of a strong trend among politicians in North America and Europe who feel the compulsion to deliver sound-bite opinions on every item of breaking news. Democratic politics has been reduced to black and white. There seems no longer to be any time to give careful consideration to a new controversy that has arisen. It is considered professional suicide for a politician to tell journalists that he or she is not sure or simply does not yet know. Such tentative judgments are taken as signs of weakness, ignorance or incompetence, even when any reasonable person would accept that there is a lot of sense in not rushing to a fixed opinion.
It is a grim outcome when politicians are condemned for failing to have an instant reaction for the cameras. Yet the deadly consequences of this unwise motor-mouth behavior are there for everyone to see. Maybe it is time for democracies to row back from sound-bites and persuade the voracious press corps that hangs on the words of their politicians that many of the most important issues that confront the world today need far more consideration and examination than can be conveyed in a ten-second piece to camera or in 140 characters or less.
