When the YouGov poll of 41 countries asking after the most admired men and women in the world for 2019 came out, I had to ask what it showed about the puissance of Trumpian tweets. Was the world listening?
This sort of polling used to be limited to the U.S. and Canada, resulting in the POTUS and First Lady always ranking high, usually number one in their gender categories. Those days are gone, and now people well known in China or India appear near the top. Entertainers generally do better than politicians.
Still, President Donald Trump comes in at 14 among men with First Lady Melania Trump at 19 among women. I can lose myself wondering how much of the result is name identification and if that does not explain the result what were those people thinking?
Bill Gates tops the men, and this seems rational. He’s a pleasant man who spent the first half of his life becoming fabulously wealthy and then resolved to spend the last half giving all that money away and urging other wealthy folks to do the same.
I was amused when Warren Buffett agreed but found himself daunted by the task of giving away billions of dollars in a useful manner. And, like many rich people who did not inherit their wealth, he enjoyed his work and found himself cut off from it by the task of giving away money. So he settled $2 billion on each of his children and sent the bulk of the remainder to the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. At that time — 2006 — Buffett’s contribution to the Gates Foundation was the largest single charitable contribution in history. Buffett came in at 11 on the list of most admired men in the world.
Digression is a hazard with so many interesting characters, but my purpose was to check for names from the Trumpian Twitterverse.
Barack Obama came in second. Oops.
Xi Jinping was fourth, but he was beaten by Jackie Chan — probably because Chan is popular both inside and outside China.
Vladimir Putin comes in at ten — down four from last year, leading me to wonder which direction Mr. Trump’s esteem pulled?
Turkish strongman Recep Tayyip Erdoğan was 19. I note in passing that India’s Narendra Modi was six, but I do not recall that Modi has scored highly on the Trump meter.
Mr. Trump tweets very little about religion, but public opinion sets the Dalai Lama at eight and Pope Frank at 15. Trump ranked one notch higher than Pope Frank and Trump’s Two Corinthians did not make the chart — neither one of them.
Mr. Trump will disapprove that Michelle Obama is the most admired woman in the world for 2019, having displaced Angelina Jolie for the top spot.
Other women who withstood the thunderbolts from Trump’s Twitter feed are Hillary Clinton at eight (her husband no longer ranks among the men), Taylor Swift at ten, Ellen DeGeneres at 15, and two more female politicians who have been disrespected in Trumpworld: Germany’s Angela Merkel at 12 and former U.K. Prime Minister Theresa May at 18, just ahead of the First Lady.
There are also two women on the most admired list that Trump has tweeted about positively (although not often): Oprah Winfrey at two and Queen Elizabeth at four.
Both the women and the men appear to show that approval by President Trump is not the kiss of death. Of course, positive mentions are rare and usually one offs. The primary use of White House Tweets is attack and Republican office holders cower in fear at the thought of being spanked on Twitter.
Mr. Trump does not seem to inform world opinion when he tweets, but he holds that part of the world that matters to him — the Republican Party — in the palm of his small hand.
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This post was previously published on Medium and is republished here with permission from the author.
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