Talkathon
When North Korea launched another missile recently, Donald Trump tweeted: “Does this guy have anything better to do with his life?” But POTUS hadn’t been doing choir practice with the angels either. He had just finished tweeting a visual of himself beating up another human with a CNN logo for a head. LSE fellow Brian Klaas says Trump has tweeted about CNN 431 times. Rest of the scorecard: Afghanistan: 36. Poverty: 12. Education: 29. Opioid: 1. When not online — because no ghost tweeter can live up to that — Trump spent 35 of his 164 days in office at golf clubs, suggest news reports. Oh, and he did take a swing at work too. Remember, Paris? There, there. Don’t you cry, North Korea.
Walkathon
Angela Merkel doesn’t have a Twitter account, and look at the German economy — strong jobs market, budget surplus, falling public debt... Trudeau has 3.40 million followers and 15k tweets. Canada’s economy has never been in better shape (ahem). It’s not her best hour but Theresa May has 369k followers, 288 tweets. Macron, who has been in office 57 days, has 1.58 million followers and 4,332 tweets against Trump’s 33.5 million and 35.2k tweets. When Trump pulled the plug on the Paris climate deal, Macron gave a speech (in English) that was all chivalry with jibe in place. Putting a spin on Trump’s Make America Great Again slogan, he exhorted: “Make Our Planet Great Again.” Tweetworthy.
Merathon
@narendramodi has 31.4 million followers. Just to help benchmark. India’s unemployed: 17 million-plus. Poor: 224 million. Kids who don’t attend school: 84 million. The PM’s handle has posted 15.8k tweets. Updates about government initiatives, pleasantries, news from foreign tours — he has apparently covered 49 in 3 years, words of condemnation for Stockholm, London, Manchester terror attacks... On Day 1 in Israel, he put out a 22-word tweet with photographs. If we take that as the standard tweet-length, 15,800 tweets equal 3,47,600 words. The last 4 months, there have been 20-plus civilian deaths in Kashmir; 50-plus queue deaths after DeMo; 61 cow-related lynchings since 2014; thousands of farmer suicides. And words of empathy?
PS: Speculation is on if Trump will face a Twitter ban for promoting violence. In times when social media is oxygen, that’s a threat more potent than Kim Jong-un’s nukes. Something to think about!
Upala Sen
