President-elect Trump got me to do something I never thought I would: use a Twitter account.
Trump is two years younger than I am (he’s 70), which means he would have been a sophomore when I was a senior in high school. Seniors can’t let sophomores have privileges seniors don’t have. So if Trump has a Twitter account, I figured I’d better have one, too. Besides, 70 is the new 50, so at 72 I’ve still got plenty of tweets left in me.
Actually, I had set up a Twitter account two years ago but could never see any point to it. What was the big deal? Why would I want to “follow” the comments of Tom Brady or the Kardashians? Who cares at my age to hear from sports and television stars every day, or every week?
Then in the midst of our wacky presidential campaign, I saw a journalist pull out her cellphone on air in a televised panel discussion and say, “Donald Trump just tweeted that he apologized for his sexist statement.”
Suddenly I realized the value of Twitter. It is the news before the news gets packaged and sold. It’s news straight from the tweeter’s mouth.
In the case of Donald Trump, it is the chirps of a real billionaire madly punching keys on his cellphone in his penthouse or his limousine without a press secretary or campaign manager cleaning up the 140-character Twitter mess. He even told the press, “I don’t need you guys any more. I have 15 million followers on Twitter.”
And so he does.
Full disclosure, I’ve never seen the TV show The Apprentice, so Donald Trump has not been in my living room for the 14 seasons of that show shouting “You’re fired!”
But he has been in the living room of millions and millions of Americans for 14 years, just as Lucille Ball of the TV show I Love Lucy was in my living room when I was a kid.
When she died in 1989 I was in my 40s but I actually felt sad, even though I had never met her or seen her in the flesh. She had been company in the house I grew up in, every week for 14 years visiting via a small mahogany box. In a strange way, she was family.
Donald Trump has figured that out for 2016.
He has been company in the homes of millions and millions of Americans for years, arriving now via a digital screen, and becoming part of the dinner conversation, even the family.
And like a familiar neighbor, he now invites us back over to his house: Trump Tower in New York, Mar-a-Lago in Florida, Bedminster Golf Course in New Jersey, via 140 characters on Twitter, often more than one tweet a day.
His campaign managers took his Twitter account away the final week of the campaign to force him to stay on his teleprompter script.
I thought when he got elected president they would shut the Twitter account down or commandeer it and fill it with the same slick garbage that Obama press secretary Josh Earnest fills his White House press briefings with.
But no. Trump is madly tweeting out angry comments as president-elect to the cast of the musical Hamilton who “insulted” Vice President-elect Pence in their audience; or the New York Times, which is so “unfair” — or the Saturday Night Live comedy show from which he demands “equal time.”
So why did Donald Trump get me to activate my Twitter account after not using it since I created it two years ago?
Because Donald Trump is now the president-elect.
Soon he will be steering the ship of state, and I darned well better learn where he’s steering it to, especially, as some fear, if he is a Captain Ahab who will “drag us down to doom” for his ego needs, his personal Moby Dick.
If he’s willing to take me and 15 million Twitter followers onto the captain’s deck, I’m willing to go. I want to watch carefully where we’re headed.
But we can see it another way: Trump might be viewed not as Ahab but as a modern-day Don Quixote de la Mancha, using his spear (his tweets) to tilt at windmills in the Washington swamp which he seeks to vanquish for glory.
Amazingly, Trump has already managed to topple three modern giants: the Bush/Republican windmill, the Clinton/Democratic windmill, and the pollster/pundit windmill.
The question is, can this modern Don Quixote manage to keep the loyalty of 15 million Sancho Panzas as devoted sidekicks?
Can he become not “the Donald,” which his detractors mockingly call him, but instead perhaps the Don Trumpote of America, trumpeting tweets to us all as he topples more windmills in a Washington swamp?
Paul Keane lives in Hartford.