Why Trump Isn’t Tweeting About the Olympics
You’d think two weeks of winning might be a golden opportunity. For this campaign, it's just the opposite.
You’d think Donald Trump would love the Olympics: The flag-waving pageantry, the pure, unbridled patriotism—and, my god, the winning. So much winning you almost get tired of the winning.
But actually, Trump doesn’t seem to be interested in the Olympics at all: As Team USA shatters world records and scores win after historic win, Trump’s Twitter account, his favored megaphone, has been virtually mum. Since the one awkwardly worded meme he blasted out to his feed on August 5, with his own photo in front of an American flag, Trump has tweeted about the Olympics exactly zero times. He’s attacked the media, retweeted compliments to Donald Trump, pumped up his rallies. Not a word about the events that people are tuning into every night.
Hillary Clinton, on the other hand, is seizing the opportunity to ride the wave of these feel-good Olympics. Since the start of the Rio Games, the Clinton campaign has unleashed a steady flow of social media messages congratulating theathletes and embracing their stories. And she has deliberately piled on by peppering the Olympics broadcast commercial breaks with the same brutal ad, over and over—the one that shows Trump being ridiculed on Letterman for making his clothing lines overseas.
Why has Trump hit the mute button on the Olympics, while Clinton has pumped up the volume? There’s a good reason for that, and a surprising one. The spectacle of America vanquishing its global rivals is—ironically, amazingly—utterly terriblefor the “America First” candidate.
A big part of his political message, the one you hear at his stump speeches, is that America has grown weak. America doesn’t win anymore, he says. “Crippled America” is the title of his most recent book. He alone can Make America Great Again. As someone who’s been around a few campaigns, believe me: The Olympics is about the worst thing that could have happened to the Trump train. Here’s a candidate whose message depends entirely on convincing Americans that they’re living in a failing nation overrun by criminal immigrants. And for the past two weeks, tens of millions of Americans have been glued to a multi-ethnic parade of athletes, winning easily. “Make America Great Again” has never felt more out-of-touch than it does against the backdrop of tenacious, overachieving American athletes driven by their own journeys in pursuit of the American dream.
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From the start of the opening ceremonies, the Olympics felt almost like a direct rebuke to Trump. As the 555 members of Team USA entered Rio de Janeiro’s Olympic stadium for the opening ceremonies, on an international stage before a television audience of nearly 30 million U.S. households, right up front walked fencer Ibtihaj Muhammad of Maplewood, New Jersey—the first Muslim-American Olympian to compete wearing a hijab. As a group, the athletes embodied an America utterly at odds with the one Trump’s campaign portrays on a daily basis: There was 19-year-old Mexican-American boxer Carlos Balderas of Santa Maria, California, the first in his family born in the United States, destined for the quarterfinals; there was U.S. Army Sergeant Hillary Bor, a Kenyan-born American who was poised to run the 3,000-meter steeplechase while his brother is serving our country in Afghanistan.
Trump even appeared as a subtext in athletes’ comments. “This is the America that I know and I love,” Ibtihaj Muhammad told CNN after winning a bronze medal and hugging her teammates as part of the U.S. sabre team. “The America that is inclusive, that is accepting and encompasses people from all walks of life.”
This America also wins, a lot. At press time, the United States sits far atop the Olympic medal leaderboard. We’re beating China. We’re torching the Russians. In the first 10 days of the Olympics, an American stood on the podium 84 times. Twenty-eight of those times, American Olympians stood at the very top, watching the flag rise, through tears, as "The Star-Spangled Banner" played on. For a candidate who tells us we “never win anymore,” “we don’t have a country anymore,” these soaring, transcendent images do more than evoke American pride—they also chip away, directly, at his campaign claims.
The games have always been less about individual athletes and—Ryan Lochte’s misadventures aside—more about the spirit of American resilience, optimism and possibility. And these Olympics have done more to debunk Donald Trump’s stump speech than a legion of the nation’s finest fact-checkers. It turns out that the most effective counter to the Trump spectacle isn't another Pinocchio award bestowed by the “liberal media,” or the Democratic efforts to convince Americans that their country is already great. Instead, it's an even bigger spectacle — one that is definitively not going Trump’s way.
Since the Olympics started, the polls have delivered Trump increasingly worse news: He’s struggling in states that traditionally skew Republican; his campaign is in yet another shakeup. That’s not because of the Olympics; polls don’t work that fast. But it’s hard to miss the way the nightly show has snapped his spell, and drawn the public attention to a version of America that even the most persuasive salesman can’t really convince us needs improvement.
The vast majority of Olympians likely have no interest in dipping their toes into the political currents, nor should they be asked to. They’re presumably as politically diverse as they are culturally. There may even be Trump supporters among them. And great as they’ve been, they’re still waiting for the candidate’s first tweet of congratulation.
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