I finally get why President Trump tweets.

Even though I often disagree with what he tweets and how he tweets it, the president has no choice.

Tweeting is how he controls, or steers, the media coverage of him and his administration — by setting news agendas for them, whether they like it or not.

If President Trump didn’t tweet what he tweets, the Big Media would be able to ignore important stories like the political bias and corruption that’s been going on within the FBI, Robert Mueller’s Russian investigation and the Deep State.

As a total outsider in Club DC, Trump has to defend himself at all times.

He’s hated or not wanted by the entrenched political establishment, left-leaning bureaucrats of the Deep State and liberal media elite that run the city.

He’s not a member of their club, not on their team, not one of them — and never will be.

As we’ve seen, the people who run Washington and powerful politicized government agencies like the FBI will do anything they can to impeach or get rid of Trump.

The president is surviving so far only because he doesn’t play by the DC Men’s Club’s rules.

He plays by his own rules, as a businessman, and if they come after him on bogus sexual harassment charges, collusion charges or whatever, he doesn’t care.

Meanwhile, things go much easier if you’re a member of the DC Men’s Club.

From JFK’s well-known bed hopping and Bill Clinton’s serial sexual predations to Congressman John Conyers’ chronic groping, the misbehaving male members of the Washington “family” have usually been protected — or at least they were until a couple of months ago.

If you’re a member of Congress and a known creeper like Sen. Al “I’m Going to Resign Soon” Franken, your club mates will ignore or hide your crude behavior and the liberal media can be counted on not to go around digging it up.

What we’ve found out lately is that people in Congress have been quietly protecting their own sleazeballs and slimeballs for decades.

They set up a $17 million “hush” fund in the 1990s to pay off the women and men they’ve sexually harassed or mistreated.

John Conyers even got his accusers to sign non-disclosure papers and used money from his congressional office budget to pay them off.

That’s outrageous, but the real outrage is that so few people are outraged by the fact that the women were paid to be quiet with taxpayer money.

You can’t tell me that anyone who’s been in Congress for more than a month didn’t know about Conyers’ dirty-old-man habits.

But as we’ve been learning every day, Congress’ quiet cover-ups of sexual harassers and assaulters are nothing special. They’re like the ones that were going on at NBC, CBS and in Hollywood.

Those non-government places — like NPR, Uber, the Catholic Church and on and on — put up with or protected their own bad men for a long time.

But until now the legitimate complaints of women who were harassed, humiliated, groped or worse by men who had power over them were systematically ignored, or the women were paid to go away and keep quiet.

Matt Lauer, Charlie Rose, Kevin Spacey and all the other old guys who’ve recently lost their jobs in the media and elsewhere weren’t just celebrities or big ratings’ getters.

They were “family.”

As I wrote in my book Twice Adopted, the “family” — whether it’s Congress or a TV network — always protects “Uncle Charlie the molester” and not the molested child.

From now on that’s no longer always going to be the case, which is why the women of the #MeToo movement deserve to be on the cover of Time magazine.

Copyright 2017 Michael Reagan