Donald Trump and professionalism on Twitter

Sean W. Cooper, Staff Writer

Editor’s Note: Sean W. Cooper is a sophomore at UNCW majoring in Communication Studies. He is a staff writer for The Seahawk. The opinions expressed in this article are solely those of the author. Staff writer Sean W. Cooper can be found on Twitter @SWWCoop. All suggestions or inquires may be sent via email to [email protected]

Last Sunday, President Donald J. Trump retweeted an edited GIF, from the account @Fuctupmind, that showed him swinging a golf ball at former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.

Let’s ignore the fact that the account he retweeted bears the handle @Fuctupmind, which doesn’t sound like an account with which an elected official should be involving himself.

Let’s also ignore the fact that the election has been over for nearly a year and therefore it no longer makes sense for Trump to still attack his former opponent (Although Clinton is guilty of this too, having just published the memoir What Happened blaming everybody but herself for her defeat).

The truth is that Donald Trump is the President of the United States and he shouldn’t be attacking anybody on Twitter. Now I know President Trump loves Twitter. He tweets day in and day out, even in the middle of the night, a testament to his claim that he gets only 4 or 5 hours of sleep per night, as reported by the New York Post.

However, he shouldn’t be using it as he does. I’ll say it again: this is the President of the United States.  He is quite arguably the most powerful person in the world. His behavior is supposed to serve as a role model for the American people, not a cautionary tale.

Instead of setting an example, Trump uses Twitter to attack everybody who disagrees with him and to praise everybody who supports him.  (A quick reminder that his presidency is about America, not himself.  None of us care whether anybody likes or dislikes Trump.  We just want our freedom and security.)

If you don’t believe me, look at how many times he has attacked various news outlets as “fake news” since he started using this term on January 10th.  The exact number is 107, according to a website called Trump Twitter Archive, whose mission is self-explanatory.

He has also launched a variety of insults at celebrities and people who he views as being against him. If we count every insult he has used on Twitter since joining the social network years ago, the number surpasses 2,000, as reported by the same source. These range from “loser” to “stupid” to “lightweight,” “incompetent,” “boring,” “pathetic,” and everything in between.

At a South Carolina rally in December 2015, Trump declared, “I know words.  I have the best words.” However, from the looks of these tweets, his lexicon seems to echo that of a middle-school bully.

Let’s not forget that Trump has generated controversy twice in just the past month for other “clever” visuals he has retweeted in poor taste, both regarding CNN, which, like several other news sources he has repeatedly labeled as “fake news.”

One was a picture of a locomotive running over a man with the CNN logo superimposed over his head.  The other was a video of him body slamming a man with the CNN logo replacing his head.

Just the other day, he tauntingly referred to North Korean leader Kim Jong-un as “Rocket Man.”

Now I know that Trump is in a position where he can do anything he wants short of committing high crimes or misdemeanors. There’s nothing stopping him. Therein lies the problem, though: he should be stopping himself.

Trump is lucky he’s always been at the top.  He gained control of the Trump Organization just three years after graduating from the University of Pennsylvania and he remained there up until the very moment he became the President of the United States.

Why is he lucky? His tweets demonstrate a low level of professionalism. If he worked for someone other than himself, his tweets would be shown to the human resources department and he’d soon hear a resounding “You’re fired!”; that I can tell you.