Then there’s the Twitter account of Martin Dempsey, the four-star Army general who was chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff under President Barack Obama until his retirement in 2015.
A balm in an inflamed social media universe, his account dispenses minisermons and sensible advice, often for an unnamed audience of one who uses Twitter as a delivery vehicle for insult and fabrication.
The general would never take on a commander in chief directly; none of his posts mentions President Donald Trump by name. But the daily trolling, mild by Twitter standards, is unmistakable.
“I never think it’s appropriate for senior military leaders to publicly and personally criticize the president, as he is the elected leader of the country,” Dempsey said in a telephone interview from North Carolina, where he teaches at Duke University.
He does, however, cut some slack for other retired military leaders, like Gen. Stanley McChrystal and Adm. William McRaven, who have made criticisms that “can be informative.”
“But,” Dempsey said, “that should not become the ‘new normal.'”
Even if he doesn’t take on the president by name, any of the general’s followers would be hard pressed not to contrast his steady counsel with the pronouncements of the man in the White House.
On Jan. 25, after Trump ended the longest government shutdown in history by acceding to essentially the same deal he rejected in December, Dempsey tweeted:
“Leadership: the art of motivating people to act toward achieving common goals. Brinksmanship: the art of pushing a confrontation to the limit of safety to force a desired outcome. One is persuasive, the other coercive. One feels like success, the other like failure. #Leadership”
A day earlier, when the president was threatening to declare a national emergency to build a wall on the southern border, the retired general posted:
“In solving complex problems and resolving contentious issues, the most effective leaders use their influence much more than their authority. The goal is to solve problems so that they stay solved. Solutions imposed rarely last.#RadicalInclusion”
The hashtag #RadicalInclusion is a bit of self-promotion for a book by the same name that he wrote last year with Ori Brafman. But the thought behind it comes from his decades of experience commanding troops and managing complex missions.
“I’m constantly thinking about and always looking around for examples of good leadership and bad leadership,” Dempsey told me. “It’s harder to be a leader today because of the proliferation of information and the intensity of scrutiny.”
In his book, he argues that with ubiquitous access to news and information, business, industry and government leaders will lose control over their organizations unless they share control over problem-solving with teams that include more people in the process and are primed for action, not for paralysis. (The book’s subtitle is “What the Post-9/11 World Should Have Taught Us About Leadership.”)
Dempsey sometimes tweets inspirational quotes, like this one, citing industrialist and philanthropist Andrew Carnegie: “No man will make a good leader who wants to do it all himself or to take all the credit for doing it.”
Dempsey says he tries to be as “nonpolitical as possible,” although he will comment on matters directly related to his service while in uniform.
In 2017 he responded after Trump claimed that Obama and other presidents did not call the families of fallen American service members:
“POTUS 43 & 44 and first ladies cared deeply, worked tirelessly for the serving, the fallen, and their families. Not politics. Sacred Trust.”
“Nobody asked me to respond, but I was in a unique position to say that wasn’t true,” he told me.
The retired general weighed in in November when Trump deployed military forces to the Mexican border, stoking fears about an “immigrant invasion” in the days before the midterm election.
He tweeted:
“Our men and women in uniform are better trained, better equipped, and better led so they meet any threat with confidence. A wasteful deployment of over-stretched Soldiers and Marines would be made much worse if they use force disproportional to the threat they face. They won’t.”
Dempsey exercises self-discipline rare for social media. Normally, before he hits the send button on a tweet, he will let the tweet sit overnight to be sure it’s not something he will regret.
Most of those who comment on his tweets are approving, he said, while about a quarter tell him some version of “mind your own business.”
While his opinions have largely focused on the best use of power — “Real power is power used for the good of the many not the few” — they have also explored the misuse of power.
“Responsible leaders don’t fabricate fear to motivate their followers,” he tweeted in August. And last month, he emphasized the need for credibility: “Trust. Years to build, seconds to break, forever to repair. The one, non-negotiable, indispensable, ingredient of leadership. An everyday, all-the-time factor in any productive relationship. #Leadership”:
Will any of this cause the president to pause and reflect? Probably not. But other leaders and would-be leaders could learn a thing or two.