How tweet this presidency with Donald Trump will be

Of all the social media platforms out there, I probably despise Twitter the most.

Sure, I get tired of people tagging me in prayer requests on Facebook, endorsing me on LinkedIn for skills that they have no idea whether I actually possess (granted, I can do anything) and sending me requests on FarmersOnly.com. I met and married a girl who has a riding lawnmower, and that’s close enough to farming for me.

Like Facebook and other social media sites, falsehoods permeate Twitter. Facebook, however, has the ability to provide context for its baloney with extensive fake news articles and bogus stats and graphics. Twitter, with its 140-character limit, offers no room for context. Sure, you can write some long piece, make a screen capture of it and then post it as a photo on Twitter, but if you have to go through that much rigamarole, then why use Twitter in the first place.

But as much as I hate Twitter, our next president, loves it. He mostly uses it to talk about how great Donald Trump is, how great Donald Trump was and how great Donald Trump will be. It’s his primary source of addressing such major issues as the humor quality of “Saturday Night Live” or the ratings of the new “Celebrity Apprentice.” (I had no idea anybody watched that even when the great DJT was hosting it.)

I didn’t vote for the guy, but I did assume he would scale back the immature tweets and begin to act semi-presidential and embarrass us significantly less. I was mistaken — bigly.

However, there may be a few positive side effects to having the Twitter-addicted equivalent of a 14-year-old drama queen leading the free world as president of the United States.

For starters, those long drawn-out State of the Union speeches will be a thing of the past. After all the standing up, sitting down, applauding and standing up again as folks make their way into the Capitol to witness the historical event that is the SOTU, I expect the Notorious DJT to say, “My fellow Americans,” and then whip out his phone and tweet his entire speech in 140 characters or less:

“SOTU strong. Pretty sure never said Mexico would pay 4 wall. War with China Obama’s fault. SNL still not funny. #CUNextYear”

All the great, great moments of this presidency will be marked in tweets for the ages, which you’ll either see by following Trump on Twitter or by turning the channel to CNN, the network that invented President Trump, which begins its newscasts these days with Trump tweets and then talks to four people about Trump’s tweets. Two of the people will tell us it’s not to be taken seriously, and the other two will tell us it’s the end of the world.

I wonder what it would have been like if Lincoln and Douglas had been engaged in Twitter wars instead of debates or if George Washington ended every statement with the hastag “#NoLie.” I guess Americans a century from now will be able to sit back with their leather-bound copies of “The Tweets of Donald Trump” and learn what America was like in the early 21^st century.

Or, they could get a better picture of what America was like in these years by reading my book, “What Was America Like in the Early 21^st Century?” Don’t tell anybody, but the answer is “#PrettyStupid.”

And the whole book will be 140 characters or less.

This story was originally published January 9, 2017 at 11:10 AM with the headline "How tweet this presidency with Donald Trump will be."