Trump’s rants are leaving foreign diplomats 'exhausted'

Throughout his first presidency, Donald Trump used social media relentlessly — and he has used it just as much since returning to the White House a year ago. A key difference, however, is that while Trump used Twitter (now X) constantly during his first term, he is now using his own Truth Social platform as his main social media outlet.

In an article published on January 25, The Guardian's Patrick Wintour describes the challenges that Trump's nonstop social media use poses for diplomats.

"The White House Stenographer's Office calculates it has transcribed 2.4 million of Trump's words — four times the length of Tolstoy's epic 'War and Peace,'" Wintour explains. "Tracking Trump is not just a problem for exhausted reporters, but also, exhausted diplomats, who are tasked with searching for the signal in the ceaseless Trumpian noise. Western diplomats have upgraded their media monitoring operations to take account of Trump's habit of dropping an explosive policy announcement or launching an unexpected incendiary broadside against an ally at almost any point in the 24/7 news cycle."

During Trump's first year back in office, Wintour reports, Trump "posted on Truth Social 6606 times."

A diplomat told The Guardian that diplomats typically start the day by asking, "What has he said this time?"

Wintour notes that for European diplomats, one of the things that makes Trump's late-night posts so challenging is the time difference. While the U.K. is five hours ahead of the United States' East Coast, France, Germany and Spain are six hours ahead,

A U.K.-based diplomat, interviewed on condition of anonymity, told The Guardian, "You can have the speech live on your dinner table at home, and he starts speaking about his childhood of playing at a park next to a mental hospital and his mother telling him he could have been a professional baseball player. You start to switch off — you don't want to live inside this man’s head — and then, you realize you missed something."

Read Patrick Wintour's full article for The Guardian at this link.