The article I chose was “Why Trump Is So Obsessed With Antifa”, by Ben Zimmer. The
article discusses the ongoing protests and rallies after George Floyd’s death and the president’s
reaction to the movement. As always the president remained quite vocal on the issue through
his preferred social media platform, twitter. Trump rushed to twitter to address the “thugs of
minneapolis” (Zimmer, 2020, para. 2) as well as find a culprit to blame for the current situation.
He chose the Antifa and in his tweets stated that the “Antifa led anarchists, among others, were
shut down quickly” (Zimmer, 2020, para. 2); this statement leads the American people to believe
all the violence and looting is the fault of the Antifa for starting this without truly understanding
the connotation of the word/organization. Antifa was an anti-fascist organization that Trump has
left open to interpretation in order to mold it into a ‘scapegoat’ needed to provide the public
someone to blame.
This article has a connection to this chapter’s concept of public presidency. There are
many forms of public presidency in which the president reaches out to the public in search of
their support. The current president has chosen twitter as his form of reaching the public.
Currently, in this article, he is trying to reach the public by providing them a reason for the
current violence, even though there is little evidence that Antifa has played a big role in the
protests.
In my opinion, I think that the president is using public presidency incorrectly. Instead of
uniting the country in this time of need, he would rather find someone to blame. Finding
someone to blame could only lead to more violence and possibly a temporary solution. Right
now, we need something long term, not a simple scapegoat. Trump should not be releasing this
kind of information without real proof to back it up, this could lead to public backlash and loss of
support from his followers. All in all, this public presidency was conducted poorly and shows
Trump’s lack of professionalism as well as responsibility in times like these.
Word count: 350
Link: https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/why-trump-is-so-obsessed-with-antifa/ar-BB152LFE
