Trump's Attention-Diversion Tweet Cycle Goes International
The cycle is as old as the Trump presidency: President Trump tweets; the American public reacts; the tweet and the reaction to it dominate the news and political debate; repeat. Nearly a year into the president’s term, Americans are presumably starting to get used to it. Yet for the rest of the world, where the American president’s tweets are not always a matter of national news, it’s different.
A case in point is the United Kingdom. On Wednesday, Britons learned that distributed through the account of Jayda Fransen, the deputy leader of the far-right ultranationalist British political movement Britain First. The group, which advocates anti-immigrant and anti-Islam policies, was relatively obscure within British politics, but soon enjoyed international attention after the president’s retweets to his nearly 44 million followers.
