I am not convinced that these tweets are simply impetuous outbursts from an adult who has the temperament of a bullying 12-year-old. It seems more probable that his right-wing advisers, including Stephen Bannon, view the tweets as part of a legitimate tool to attack their perceived political foes. In this case, the attack was not simply on Jones but also on unions that may rebel against Trump's policies in the future.
Trump is at war with democracy, and his online attacks will take place not only in conjunction with ongoing acts of state repression but also with the production of violence in the culture at large, which Trump is seeking to orchestrate as if he were producing a reality TV show. At first glance, such responses seem as thoughtless as they are trivial, given the issues that Trump should be considering, but Frank Rich may be right in suggesting that Trump's tweets, which amount to an attack on the First Amendment, are part of a strategy engineered by Bannon to promote a culture war that riles "up his base and retains its loyalty should he fail, say, to deliver on other promises, like reviving the coal industry."
In addition, such attacks function to initiate a culture war that serves to repress dissent and divert the public from more serious issues, all the while driving up ratings for a supine media that will give Trump unqualified and uncritical coverage. Referring to the Dixon incident, Rich writes:
"It's possible that much of that base previously knew little or nothing about Hamilton, but thanks to Pence's visit, it would soon learn in even the briefest news accounts that the show is everything that [the] base despises: a multi-cultural-ethnic-racial reclamation of 'white' American history with a ticket price that can soar into four digits -- in other words, a virtual monument to the supposedly politically correct 'elites' that Trump, Bannon, and their wrecking crew found great political profit in deriding throughout the campaign. Pence's visit to Hamilton was a sure-fire political victory for Trump even without the added value of a perfectly legitimate and respectful curtain speech that he could trash-tweet to further rouse his culture-war storm troopers. The kind of political theater that Trump and Bannon fomented around Hamilton is likely to be revived routinely in the Trump era."
Trump's trash-tweeting mimics the hate-filled discourse and threats of violence in which he often engaged during the presidential primary campaign -- only now he has a much broader audience. Americans are already witnessing a growing climate of violence across the United States, spurred on by Trump's previous support of such actions aimed at Muslims, immigrants, Black people, foreign students and others deemed expendable by Trump's white ultra-nationalist supporters.
Of course, none of this should seem surprising given the long legacy of such violence, along with the decline of the welfare state and the rise of the punishing state since the 1970s. What is distinctive is that the formative culture, organizations and institutions that support such violence have moved from the fringe to the center of American politics.
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