Trump is currently a man without enemies. His attempts at elevating Head Clown Chuck Schumer have failed; his jabs at Hillary Clinton are like the Rolling Stones playing “Jumping Jack Flash” in 2017—the diehards may cheer but everyone else just rolls their eyes. On Friday afternoon, Donald Trump took to Twitter to throw a left jab at the only enemy he has left: The media.
But Trump deleted this tweet after only one minute. Why? Did he believe that he had crossed a line? That labeling the media as treasonous did little to repair America’s fraying social bonds? That it’s unfair to call people who are just doing their jobs FAKE NEWS or SICK? Or that the entire structure of this tweet was weirdly messianic, transferring his personal enemy—in this case, an abstraction—onto the “people” (which in Trump’s case strictly refers to citizens)?
No. Twenty minutes later Trump re-upped.
The FAKE NEWS media (failing @nytimes, @NBCNews, @ABC, @CBS, @CNN) is not my enemy, it is the enemy of the American People!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) February 17, 2017
Trump deleted a tweet just because he wanted to label some other media organizations as “fake news”—in this case the three major non-FOX networks.