Trump's Twitter has been conspicuously calm on his overseas travels. There's a reason for that.

(Image credit: Mandel Ngan/AFP/Getty Images)

published 24 May 2017

Since President Trump left the U.S. for Saudi Arabia, Israel, and Europe on Friday, his Twitter feed has been uncommonly restrained and professionally political. Some observers explain this lull by pointing to what The Wall Street Journal referred to Friday as a Twitter "intervention" by White House aides worried the president was putting himself in legal jeopardy, while others speculate that Trump doesn't have access to the same cable news channels abroad that he watches and reacts to at home. Politico has another explanation:

For four straight days, President Donald Trump did not live-tweet the cable shows. He didn't mention his unlikely electoral win. And in visits to two countries where he was greeted with great fanfare, he never once complained about being treated unfairly. Trump's relatively successful swing through the Middle East was due to the fact that, for the most part, he didn't get in his own way. It was also the result of months of careful planning. A decision was made early on to visit a part of the world where Trump is venerated and feared, and to pack his schedule so that he mostly stayed on message and, according to one aide, "didn't have time to tweet." [Politico]

That may change now that he's in Europe, however. The Middle Eastern leg of the tour was carefully orchestrated by National Security Adviser H.R. McMaster, his deputy Dina Powell, and Trump son-in-law Jared Kushner. The European leg has "not been tightly managed by Kushner, Powell, and McMaster," Politico says, and Trump will be greeted less warmly than in the Middle East.