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Why isn't Trump Tweeting about the Olympics?
From Politico: http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2016/08/donald-trump-olympics-twitter-214176
You’d think Donald Trump would love the Olympics: The flag-waving pageantry, the pure, unbridled patriotism—and, my god, the winning. So much winning you almost get tired of the winning.
But actually, Trump doesn’t seem to be interested in the Olympics at all: As Team USA shatters world records and scores win after historic win, Trump’s Twitter account, his favored megaphone, has been virtually mum. Since the one awkwardly-worded meme he blasted out to his feed on August 5, with his own photo in front of an American flag, Trump has tweeted about the Olympics exactly zero times. He’s attacked the media, retweeted compliments to Donald Trump, pumped up his rallies. Not a word about the events that people are tuning into every night.
Hillary Clinton, on the other hand, is seizing the opportunity to ride the wave of these feel-good Olympics. Since the start of the Rio Games, the Clinton campaign has unleashed a steady flow of social media messages congratulating the athletes and embracing their stories. And she has deliberately piled on by peppering the Olympics broadcast commercial breaks with the same brutal ad, over and over—the one that shows Trump being ridiculed on Letterman for making his clothing lines overseas.
Why has Trump hit the mute button on the Olympics, while Clinton has pumped up the volume? There’s a good reason for that, and a surprising one. The spectacle of America vanquishing its global rivals is—ironically, amazingly—utterly terrible for the “America First” candidate.
From the start of the opening ceremonies, the Olympics felt almost like a direct rebuke to Trump. As the 555 members of Team USA entered Rio de Janeiro’s Olympic stadium for the opening ceremonies, on an international stage before a television audience of nearly 30 million U.S. households, right up front walked fencer Ibtihaj Muhammad of Maplewood New Jersey—the first Muslim-American Olympian to compete wearing a hijab. As a group, the athletes embodied an America utterly at odds with the one Trump’s campaign portrays on a daily basis: there was 19-year-old Mexican-American boxer Carlos Balderas of Santa Maria, California, the first in his family born in the United States, destined for the quarterfinals; there was U.S. Army Sargent Hillary Bor, a Kenyan-born American who was poised to run the 3,000-meter steeplechase while his brother is serving our country in Afghanistan.
This America also wins, a lot. At press time, the United States sits far atop the Olympic medal leaderboard. We’re beating China. We’re torching the Russians. In the first 10 days of the Olympics, an American has stood on the podium 84 times. Twenty-eight of those times, American Olympians stood at the very top, watching the flag rise, through tears, as the Star Spangled Banner plays on. For a candidate who tells us we “never win anymore,” “we don’t have a country anymore,” these soaring, transcendent images do more than evoke American pride—they also chip away, directly, at his campaign claims.
But actually, Trump doesn’t seem to be interested in the Olympics at all: As Team USA shatters world records and scores win after historic win, Trump’s Twitter account, his favored megaphone, has been virtually mum. Since the one awkwardly-worded meme he blasted out to his feed on August 5, with his own photo in front of an American flag, Trump has tweeted about the Olympics exactly zero times. He’s attacked the media, retweeted compliments to Donald Trump, pumped up his rallies. Not a word about the events that people are tuning into every night.
Hillary Clinton, on the other hand, is seizing the opportunity to ride the wave of these feel-good Olympics. Since the start of the Rio Games, the Clinton campaign has unleashed a steady flow of social media messages congratulating the athletes and embracing their stories. And she has deliberately piled on by peppering the Olympics broadcast commercial breaks with the same brutal ad, over and over—the one that shows Trump being ridiculed on Letterman for making his clothing lines overseas.
Why has Trump hit the mute button on the Olympics, while Clinton has pumped up the volume? There’s a good reason for that, and a surprising one. The spectacle of America vanquishing its global rivals is—ironically, amazingly—utterly terrible for the “America First” candidate.
From the start of the opening ceremonies, the Olympics felt almost like a direct rebuke to Trump. As the 555 members of Team USA entered Rio de Janeiro’s Olympic stadium for the opening ceremonies, on an international stage before a television audience of nearly 30 million U.S. households, right up front walked fencer Ibtihaj Muhammad of Maplewood New Jersey—the first Muslim-American Olympian to compete wearing a hijab. As a group, the athletes embodied an America utterly at odds with the one Trump’s campaign portrays on a daily basis: there was 19-year-old Mexican-American boxer Carlos Balderas of Santa Maria, California, the first in his family born in the United States, destined for the quarterfinals; there was U.S. Army Sargent Hillary Bor, a Kenyan-born American who was poised to run the 3,000-meter steeplechase while his brother is serving our country in Afghanistan.
This America also wins, a lot. At press time, the United States sits far atop the Olympic medal leaderboard. We’re beating China. We’re torching the Russians. In the first 10 days of the Olympics, an American has stood on the podium 84 times. Twenty-eight of those times, American Olympians stood at the very top, watching the flag rise, through tears, as the Star Spangled Banner plays on. For a candidate who tells us we “never win anymore,” “we don’t have a country anymore,” these soaring, transcendent images do more than evoke American pride—they also chip away, directly, at his campaign claims.
The USA winning at the Olympics only shows over and over how the environment set up by Obama over the past 8 years has allowed these diverse and talented athletes to flourish and succeed. When his only narrative is that ONLY HE can fix the problems facing the USA, the fact that the USA is at 100 medals (as of this post), and in first place, only puts paid to his bluster and lies.
I suspect you won't hear anything from Trump about the Olympics. Except he might defend Lochte with more "Boys will be boys" and "a foreign country can't judge our people" sort of talk.