Day 18: Anatomy of a Trump Tweet
Donald Trump loves Twitter. That’s not exactly breaking news. He doesn’t use computers, but he loves the 140-character, microblogging site.
In order to best understand the man’s thoughts, let’s examine the various elements of his tweets.
We’ll use this morning’s rant as our example.
Step 1: Inspiration
Trump sees it on television, reads it in the paper, hears someone discussing it in the halls and immediately tweet about it.
Step 2: Rebut what you disagree with
Trump says “I call my own shots,” even though most stories out of the White House these days disagree with that assessment. Trump has been painted as an overwhelmed septuagenarian who watches excessive amounts of television while cuddling with Putin and letting Steve Bannon run the country.
In turn, Trump opens with a broad denial.
Step 3: Attribute some degree of science or math
Here, Trump claims he uses an “accumulation of data” to help his policy-making.
But, by all accounts, Trump is a very “by the gut” type of decision maker. He seems to abhor science and data. Trump has proclaimed global warming a hoax, discussed the debunked link between autism and vaccines, proclaimed refugees to be huge threats to national security, doubts the safety of wind farms to human beings, thinks fracking causes no damage to the environment and that your light bulb may give you cancer.
Last month, his lack of data and intelligence usage caused a botched military operation, resulting in a SEAL death and dozens of civilians.
The fact that there’s zero evidence backing up Trump’s proclamation that he uses data is irrelevant since he is trying to frame the issue.
Step 4: Appeal to the masses
“Everyone knows it” is a classic attempt to make himself feel big: that he has the support of the entire nation behind him, regardless of protests or negative press or polls.
Trump is trying to appeal to his base by saying, ‘Everyone, minus a small group of people, is with us and agree with me.’
Step 5: Marginalize and/or blame shift
Trump loves to blame the messenger. If he disagrees with the message, he blames the media. By constantly categorizing the media as fake news, he’s able to tell everyone after every piece, ‘See it’s fake news. I’ve told you that many times. They hate when I point it out so they write bad things about me.’
Here, Trump is actually using the word marginalize to refer to media outlets. He’s attempting to marginalize the media by characterizing the media as attempting to marginalize him.
It’s the politician’s version of the classic children’s trope, “I know you are but what am I?”
Its shrewdness is undercut by its transparency and the fact that he uses it so often that it risks alienating all but his most blindly fervent supporters.
Step 6: Buzz Words
Throw a couple classics in there for added flavor.
Data, FAKE NEWS, lies!
Step 7: Questionable punctuation, vocabulary and grammar decisions
Trump loves capitalizing random words. His spelling borders on criminal. He somehow finds a way to ramble in only 140 characters. He has all but murdered the proper use of exclamation points.
Maybe he believes all of this makes him more one with the common man.
Here, he actually uses a couple words longer than seven letters, a rarity for Trump.
Step 8: Editorialize
These are the largely lampooned, one word endings that so many of his tweets get. Today’s tweet didn’t quite get there, but we’ve seen SAD!, Bad!, WOW! and many, many more quite frequently.
Trump uses some or most of these elements for virtually all of his non-interview touting tweets. His tweets are very easy to mock.
But understanding how and why Trump is framing issues gives Americans an insight to what’s bothering him and what messages are getting through.
18 days in, 1444 to go
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