The United States of America isn’t defined by Beltway or Manhattan elites, nor by those in Los Angeles or Silicon Valley. The mainstream media gets its cues from the collective consciousness of these four isolated reserves of great power, wealth and fame.

Donald Trump’s sparring with elites, though, is deeply satisfying to much of the rest of the country that doesn’t live in those four sectors… at least that sparring is satisfactory most of the time. There’s a limit, however, to how much good the president does by dominating media. The president met and exceeded that limit with the escalation of his war with Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski via tweets. These tweets were wrong because they were cruel. They don’t energize the base, except at its far fringes. They shrink it.

Americans do love contact sports. We swoon for heated rhetoric. If Trump can resolve to stay combative but back off cruel, it won’t matter whether he tweets once or 100 times a day.

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