Madeleine Albright hopes Trump can stop tweeting while he's abroad

Former Secretary of State Madeline Albright.

(Image credit: Mark Wilson/Getty Images)

published 18 May 2017

Former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright doesn't expect much from President Trump's first trip abroad since taking office, she said on CNN on Thursday, but silence on Twitter would be a win.

"He has to keep his mind on what he's doing," said Albright, who served under President Clinton. "And I hope, even though we seem to be setting kind of a low bar for this trip — if he just doesn't make mistakes — I hope that there is not one single tweet about anything during the nine days that he's gone." Rather than tweeting, Albright suggested, Trump should fully staff the State Department and "do his homework."

If the president's Twitter record is any indication, she is unlikely to get her wish. Since taking office, he averages one tweet every four to five hours. His longest Twitter silence since the start of his campaign was a mere two days. And his tweeting habits remain undeterred by the criticism of a strong majority of Americans, including a majority of Trump voters.

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Bonnie Kristian was a deputy editor and acting editor-in-chief of TheWeek.com. She is a columnist at Christianity Today and author of Untrustworthy: The Knowledge Crisis Breaking Our Brains, Polluting Our Politics, and Corrupting Christian Community (forthcoming 2022) and A Flexible Faith: Rethinking What It Means to Follow Jesus Today (2018). Her writing has also appeared at Time Magazine, CNN, USA Today, Newsweek, the Los Angeles Times, and The American Conservative, among other outlets.