Trump is not the first to change the rules

The argument

The premise of this argument is that the standard being applied to Trump — that he broke with what it means to be presidential — assumes a fixed standard that never existed. What counts as presidential has been shifting for decades, and earlier presidents did the shifting. The examples are drawn from popular culture rather than from policy. Bill Clinton's saxophone performance on the late-night Arsenio Hall Show in the early 1990s was originally ranked among the 'seven most unpresidential moments' by the Daily Dot — a judgment that reads oddly now, which is precisely the point about how quickly the standard moves. Barack Obama's appearance as president on the Late Show with David Letterman also raised eyebrows at the time. It was Obama, too, who first made use of Facebook and Twitter to expand his audience and reach out to voters, establishing direct communication with the public as something a president does rather than something a president submits to through the press. Behind these episodes is a structural pressure that predates any individual. Presidents and candidates now struggle to find a balance between showing a more human and engaging side and maintaining a serious, policy-focused approach. The pull toward the first is not a matter of temperament but of where audiences are: a president who refuses the informal channels forfeits them to everyone else. Each president who has tried to strike that balance has moved the line a little further, and the moves that seemed transgressive at the time became the baseline for the next occupant. On this reading, Trump was not the first to use social media, nor the first to make himself more approachable to the American public; he was the latest in a sequence. And the evolution is likely to continue after him, as more and more voters turn to social media and the internet for their news. The meaning of presidential has been evolving for decades.

Premises

Counter-arguments

No president has gone as far as Trump. Tweeting constantly and retweeting content of dubious sources without verifying it goes beyond reaching out to his base and other voters. This unpresidential behaviour goes beyond being innovative. A lot of his information is misleading or untruthful, and his constant attacks to the press go against American values of democracy.

Rejecting the premises

[Rejecting P1] The examples establish that presidents have appeared in informal settings, which was not in dispute. A saxophone performance and a late-night interview are one-off appearances arranged through conventional media; the counter-argument on record holds that continuous unmediated posting is a different practice rather than more of the same. [Rejecting P2] The balance between relatability and policy focus is a matter of presentation. The counter locates the change elsewhere — in the sustained attacks on the press and in the circulation of unverified material from dubious sources, neither of which is a question of tone. [Rejecting P3] Being first is not what the rival position claims. That earlier presidents used social media is compatible with a later one having changed what the office permits, since a difference of degree can become a difference in kind, and the premise's own framing of a continuing evolution allows for exactly that. [Rejecting C] The argument also gives no threshold at which an evolution would count as a transformation, which makes the position unfalsifiable: any conduct can be described as a further step along a trend already under way.