Sadly, with how bad faith most things from Trump have been, I have to say I don't believe you on this one.
Should it be weak, on just what you are looking at? I mean, yeah. You don't have to look hard to find that this is more than "merely" plausible. Odds are ridiculously high that the tweets were more fanning of flames.
You're surely aware that Trump regularly declares himself more knowledgeable than the experts and derides his critics as 'fake news' or 'never trumpers' etc. etc. It's not a stretch to think that more credulous folk might take his tweets literally in defiance of common sense, given the media ecosystem dedicated to promoting his 24-7.
Too true... I can't stand Trump on a personal level... but he's right about one thing. There's a lot of manipulation and outright falsities in news, and almost no research or fact checking in the twitter sphere.
And at what point does that even matter? I'm being serious.
I feel like Trump has trained people to not believe anything he says, until it happens, and then people think he's doing exactly what he said he would do. The president said Amazon is going to have problems.
The real world is vastly more complex than "true or fake". The Trump tweet you mentioned is a perfect example. His tweet was not a simple statement of fact:
> The media has not reported that the National Debt in my first month went down by $12 billion vs a $200 billion increase in Obama first mo.
That's a claim: "I have lowered the debt in my first month while Obama raised it". While the facts are true (the debt did go down), the claim is false. Trump has taken no action that would cause the debt to be lowered; it's not unusual for the debt level to fluctuate in the short term.
The real problem we have is that most people aren't interested in this kind of nuance at all. A statement that makes your team look like the winners, or the other team look like the losers, is easy to accept without much thought or analysis.
His gaslighting is not helping. It's causing a deeper distrust of institutions and the market does not like it. His historical tweet from 2014 about the then-elected president's fitness to serve "causing" a 1000pt drop is apropos.
reply