'Common Sense': How Twitter can affect politics
Matt Dowd answers viewers' questions.
— -- ABC News chief political analyst Matthew Dowd answered viewers' questions on this week's episode of "Common Sense with Matt Dowd."
1. President Trump and the G-20 summit: A number of viewers from across the country asked about the president’s overseas trip and what’s going to happen.
Dowd explained, “[President Trump] gave a speech in Poland where he reasserted that the United States will stand behind NATO, Article 5 specifically, that basically says an attack on one NATO country is an attack on all that we've come to the common defense.”
“I think his speech was well-received,” Dowd added. “The problem was he went and held a press conference where he answered only a couple of questions. And in the press conference, he attacked CNN and NBC and he actually attacked our intelligence community and doubted their conclusions on the Russians meddling in our elections.”
2. Outrage over NPR’s Fourth of July tweets: Earlier this week, NPR celebrated the holiday by tweeting out the full transcript of the Declaration of Independence, sparking outrage from some on social media. The backlash prompted one viewer from Oregon to ask, “Do not that many people know it is [the Declaration of Independence]?”
“Some of those statements from our own Declaration of Independence were attacked,” Dowd said. “Trump supporters got upset because they thought NPR was going on the attack of the president by quoting the Declaration of Independence.”
He went on, “I do think there's much more education we can do around our founding documents. Let's put the country and our Constitution ahead of the party. We need to have a common sort of sense of values that bind us together and those are reflected in our Constitution and in the Declaration of Independence. But it is quite ironic that just quoting the Declaration of Independence some Trump supporters thought they were attacking the president.”
3. President Trump’s Twitter Habit and the Media: From Ohio, a viewer asked, “Could the media take a break from covering Trump’s tweets for 24 hours?”
“No, they won’t take a break,” Dowd said.
“They're too interesting for them to cover and the news likes to cover those things. But, secondly, and more importantly, we shouldn't think of these just [as] tweets. They’re our official statements of the president of the United States from the White House. That's how we ought to view them. And so this would just be as much of a statement as he’d give in a speech or give in a piece of paper that the White House sends out. These are official statements of the president and they should be reported out.”
“Now how much time we should spend on them,” Dowd said, “that’s a whole other question. I think some of them we spend way too much time on, some of them we don't put in the right context. We should take them, and put in the context, and say what does this really mean? Some of them are just plain laughable that we should just reflect and look at and laugh. And some are important statements of policy that the president has made.”
Do you have a question for Matt Dowd? Tweet it with the hashtag #AskMattDowd and maybe you'll see it on the next episode of "Common Sense with Matt Dowd."
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