Trump, Twitter, and the American Democracy

Political Communication in the Digital Age

Yu Ouyang, Richard W. Waterman

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN:
  9783030442415
• eBook ISBN:
  9783030442422
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: American Government
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This book takes a social science approach to address two related questions: (1) what does Donald Trump say on Twitter? and (2) why? Since entering the 2016 Presidential Election, Donald Trump's tweets have been a major part of his communications strategy with the public. While the popular media has devoted considerable attention to selected tweets, it is less clear what those selected tweets tell us about Trump the businessman, the political candidate, and, finally, the President of the United States. We argue that to fully understand Trump, we must take a more comprehensive approach to examining all of his activities on Twitter. Overall, our analysis presents a strikingly complex picture of Trump and how he uses Twitter. Not only has his pattern of tweets changed over time, we find that Trump's use of Twitter is more deliberate than he has been given credit. Like most other politicians, Trump is strategically-minded about his presence on social media.

© The Author(s) 2020

Y. Ouyang, R. W. WatermanTrump, Twitter, and the American DemocracyThe Evolving American Presidencyhttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-44242-2_1

Begin Abstract

1. Social Media, Politics, and Donald Trump

Yu Ouyang¹ and Richard W. Waterman²

(1)

Department of Political Science, Economics, and World Languages, Purdue University Northwest, Hammond, IN, USA

(2)

Department of Political Science, University of Kentucky, Lexington, KY, USA

Yu Ouyang (Corresponding author)

Email: [email protected]

Richard W. Waterman

Email: [email protected]

Abstract

Since entering the 2016 Presidential Election, Donald Trump’s tweets have been a major part of his communications strategy with the public. While the popular media has devoted considerable attention to selected tweets, it is less clear what those selected tweets tell us about Trump the businessman, the political candidate, and, finally, the president of the United States. This book takes a social science approach to address two related questions: (1) what does Donald Trump say on Twitter and (2) why? We argue that to fully understand Trump both as a person and as a major political figure, we must take a more comprehensive approach to examining all of his activities on Twitter. This introductory chapter lays out our approach.

Keywords

Donald TrumpTwitterCase studiesMedia coveragePresidential rhetoric

End Abstract

Speaking to reporters on February 18, 2020, President Donald Trump stated, “I probably wouldn’t have gotten here without social media because I certainly don’t get fair press.” He then added, “Social media, for me, has been very important because it gives me a voice, because I don’t get that voice in the press. In the media, I don’t get that voice. So I’m allowed to have a voice.”¹

As the president reveals, Twitter provides presidents with a voice that allows them to communicate directly with the public. It also allows them to circumvent the power of the press, which since at least the days of Richard Nixon has been increasingly more negative in its coverage of U.S. presidents. While Barack Obama was the first president to tweet, Donald Trump has established a new method of presidential communication. What we call going directly public (or as we cleverly refer to it, GDP) is not merely a new means of communication, it is a major development in the accretion of presidential power. Our book therefore is not merely an examination of Trump’s tweets—it represents an evaluation of a new mechanism designed to advance presidential power. It also raises a serious question that concerned the Founders. Does presidential rhetoric, in this case in the form of GDP, promote democracy or does it reflect a movement toward mob rule and demagoguery?

Persistent Interests in Trump’s Tweets

On July 14, 2019, President Donald Trump renewed his attacks against the four female Democratic lawmakers led by Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York. The president tweeted that the four liberal members of Congress should “go back and help fix the totally broken and crime infested places from which they came.”² Three of the lawmakers actually were born in the United States. The president’s tweet promoted a backlash to his ongoing Twitter fight with members of “The Squad,” as the four representatives were known. Despite negative press, Trump not only continued his attacks, especially on Representative Ilhan Omar of Minnesota (Rupar 2019a), a Muslim originally born in Somalia, he maintained that his words were not racist (Forgey 2019a; Liptak and Collins 2019).

Still, immediate public responses to the racially charged language in Trump’s tweets arose from across the political spectrum. For example, in unity with other Democrats (Resto-Montero 2019), Senator Elizabeth Warren condemned Trump’s words and tweeted in response that Trump’s tweet was “[a] racist and xenophobic attack on Democratic congresswomen. This ∗is∗ their country, regardless of whether or not Trump realizes it.”³ Nancy Pelosi, the Speaker of the House of Representatives, responded by noting that, “when [Trump] tells four American Congresswomen to go back to their countries, he reaffirms his plan to ‘Make America Great Again’ has always been about making America white again” (Saacks 2019). Responses from Republican members of Congress were more measured, walking a delicate balance between direct criticisms of the president and the policy sentiment therein (Everett and Arkin 2019). Senator Lindsey Graham, a strong ally of the president on Capitol Hill, noted that Trump’s words were more narcissist than racist, criticized the policies that the Congresswomen support, and suggested that Trump “aim higher” (Panetta 2019). Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell refused to speak directly on Trump’s tweets, focusing instead on “criticizing the ‘incendiary rhetoric’ across the ideological spectrum. He ultimately concluded that the ‘president’s not a racist’” (Zhou 2019).

Regardless of the underlying intent of Trump’s tweets in this case, two points seem clear. First, despite the immediate and strong condemnations of Trump’s rhetoric (Davis 2019), there are advantages for Trump to engage in negative political attacks on Twitter. As Kim (2019) reports in a Vox article on July 17, 2019, “following the uproar surrounding Trump’s racist comments, support for the president among Republicans rose by 5 percentage points to 72 percent… His net approval rating dropped by 2 percent among Democrats.” In other words, Trump gained further approval from his base supporters while losing only a small degree of support (within the margin of error) from Democrats, who were unlikely to support him anyway. Second, as often is the case with Trump’s tweets, unplanned policy announcements via Twitter resulted in confusion and a scramble to incorporate and to defend Trump’s spontaneous outbursts. His attacks on The Squad sparked a rush by his 2020 campaign team to incorporate and “to repackage the attack on the four women of color into a broader patriotic message” (Orr 2019).

As another example of a controversy that mostly began on Twitter, consider also Trump’s decision to pull U.S. troops out of Syria. U.S. involvement on the ground in Syria began in October of 2015 when President Barack Obama ordered the deployment of dozens of special operations troops into Syria to advise the locals fighting against the Islamic State (Baker et al. 2015). By the end of 2018, there were approximately 2000 U.S. troops in Syria, in mainly supporting roles to Syrian Kurdish allies fighting against ISIS. Ever critical of U.S. military involvement overseas, Trump announced abruptly on Twitter on December 19, 2018, that ISIS had been defeated, and he intended to bring the troops home.⁴ Then on October 6, 2019, following a phone call with Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, the White House announced that Turkey would begin military operations in the Turkey-Syria border region against the Kurds, and U.S. forces would withdraw from the northeastern Syria area (Schmitt et al. 2019). While the timing of Trump’s decision to withdraw troops from Syria may have surprised many people, including officials serving inside his own administration, his decision to do so was not. In an off-script comment at an event in Ohio on infrastructure in March 2018, Trump commented on the state of ISIS, noting that, “We’re knocking the hell out of ISIS. We’ll be coming out of Syria like very soon. Let the other people take care of it now” (quoted in Browne and Starr 2018). He tweeted on December 19, 2018, that it is time to bri...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Front Matter
• 1. Social Media, Politics, and Donald Trump
• 2. Trump Tweets: A Desire for Attention
• 3. Trump Tweets: How Often and on What Topics
• 4. Trump Tweets: A Text Sentiment Analysis
• 5. Trump, Twitter, and the American Democracy
• Back Matter