Trump’s tweet divides Americans

PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP is a prolific Twitter user. Since entering the White House in January 2017 he has published more than 6,000 posts on the social-media platform. The tweets, which are currently broadcast to nearly 62m followers, have been declared by lawyers from America’s Justice Department to be “official statements” from the president. A recent one has left many appalled.

On July 14th Mr Trump told four black or brown-skinned congresswomen to “go back” to the “crime infested places from which they came.” The four women are all American citizens; three were born in the United States. One is the first Somali-American woman elected to Congress; another the first Palestinian-American woman elected to Congress; another the first African-American woman from Massachusetts elected to Congress. The most famous of the lot, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, is the youngest ever congresswoman.

Mr Trump’s remarks sparked outrage among Democratic lawmakers. On July 16th the Democrat-controlled House officially condemned them, the first such rebuke of a sitting president in 100 years. But what about Americans at large? Since the beginning of Mr Trump’s presidency YouGov, a pollster, has asked a sample of Americans to rate each of his tweets on a scale from “Terrible” to “Great”, and applied a numerical value to each rating (Terrible = -2; Bad = -1; OK = 0; Good = 1; Great = 2). The data show that, as of July 14th, Mr Trump’s median tweet has received an average score of just below “OK” (-0.2). Unsurprisingly, the results are highly partisan. Democrats have rated his tweets “Bad” (-1.1) while Republicans have rated them “Good” (1.0).

As for Mr Trump’s “go back” tweets, many Americans deemed them perfectly acceptable. Republicans scored them just below “Good” (0.9), not far below their rating of the typical Trump tweet. Democrats, meanwhile, rated the tweets between “Bad” and “Terrible” (-1.5), and among the worst 5% of tweets the president has published while in office. When asked on July 15th whether he was concerned that some viewed his remarks as racist, Trump said he was not. “It doesn’t concern me because many people agree with me,” Trump said. That appears to be true.