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O’Brien: Twitter has little to fear from Trump

Photo by Doug Mills of The New York Times / President Donald Trump sits in the Oval Office with an executive order he signed that seeks to limit the legal protections under the Communications Decency Act, which generally shields social media companies like Twitter from liability for the content posted on their platforms, at the White House in Washington on May 28, 2020.
Photo by Doug Mills of The New York Times / President Donald Trump sits in the Oval Office with an executive order he signed that seeks to limit the legal protections under the Communications Decency Act, which generally shields social media companies like Twitter from liability for the content posted on their platforms, at the White House in Washington on May 28, 2020. Photo by Doug Mills of The New York Times / President Donald Trump sits in the Oval Office with an executive order he signed that seeks to limit the legal protections under the Communications Decency Act, which generally shields social media companies like Twitter from liability for the content posted on their platforms, at the White House in Washington on May 28, 2020.

By Timothy L. O'Brien / Bloomberg News 4 min read

Donald Trump was at the steering wheel as we drove through the rain together on a New Jersey highway in 2005. He had recently considered taking the stage to play a politician in the Broadway comedy “La Cage aux Folles,” but he had other things on his mind as he glanced over at me.

“I have one asset that I think nobody else has. And that’s that if somebody writes about me badly, I sort of own my own newspaper in a way. Like I went after you on the ‘Today’ show,” he told me. “I do have the ability to fight back in the media. I can say that, ‘You, Tim, is not smart. Is a terrible guy.'”

“A total whack job,” I suggested, since he’d used that one before.

“I can say that. Nobody else can . Because I’m on television every day,” he continued.

Remember, this was 15 years ago and Twitter hadn’t yet been invented. Neither had Instagram or Snapchat. Facebook was still a baby. But Trump already instinctively understood one of his advantages as a ubiquitous and media-soaked mogul: He had direct access to readers and viewers and could circumvent traditional news sources to get his message out or to go into battle.