Thirty Minutes on Trump’s Twitter

…hastily written at the laundromat while my clothes were drying (links and pictures added after folding and putting away)

9:23pm
As a sort of pre-writing exercise for a larger project I am working on, I figured it would be interesting to see if I could condense many of my thoughts on Donald Trump’s Twitter usage into thirty minutes of stray sentences, fragments, and hopefully-not-too-pedantic-prose. Given what I have to say (see below), the irony of this approach is not lost on me. However…

9:25pm
Donald Trump is the perfect candidate for the social media age; he is like a realization of every prognosticator’s worse fears about the power of a medium that pervades so much of our life, demands so little of our thought, and is essentially designed to makes us feel better about ourselves and those who we most identify with. That is to say, Trump is in fact the expert manipulator of media he claims to be — not only in the “traditional” press such as TV or newspapers, but also and especially in social media. There are reasons for this, but Trump’s arrival seems early.

9:29pm
Trump’s arrival is early because we have not yet seen an American Presidential candidate like him in the social media age. I am not sure we’ve seen one anywhere in the world. Indeed, even the most dire predicitions tended to expect some kind of bridge of sorts between a campaign like that run by Obama in 2012 and Trump in2016. Perhaps we expected something, for example, like how Hillary Clinton’s campaign has run its social media. All of these presidential campaigns were, of course, savvy about how to use social media to broadcast messages to their base, to grab a headline or two along the way (Obama’s 2008/2012 campaigns were very good with photos and videos, especially), and to suggest they were progressing with the times.

Beyond fundraising, few of them truly exploited the political power of the medium, though, and that is where Trump’s genius shines.

9:33pm
If there is one thing that Donald Trump understands about social media — and Twitter, especially — it is that the “economy” of discourse that it represents is exactly the telos of 30+ years of soundbite campaigns. There is a direct lineage from “There he goes again,” to “Senator, you’re no Jack Kennedy,” (Bentsen) to to “The 80s are calling to ask for their foreign policy back” (Obama) to “Wow, Jeb Bush, whose campaign is a total disaster, had to bring in mommy to take a slap at me. Not nice!” (Trump). Trump understand that short, quotable, abrasive lines are those that people will talk about, that resonate with how so many have been conditioned to think about politics and politicians, that will keep him in the news. This was true in the primary, it is doubly true in the general election.

9:43pm
Hillary Clinton gave a speech accepting the nomination at the DNC Convention that was, by almost any and all traditional mesaures of good speech writing, a rhetorical masterpiece. It not only had an abundance of well chosen words and phrases (including a fair number of soundbites), but it was very much full of those rhetorical flourishes that have marked many of the great speeches in American history (reminiscence and hopefulness, parallelism and metaphor, etc.). It was written with a particualr word economy in mind — one that translates well to circulation in social media. It was, however, only the second-best speech of acceptance from the perspective of social media savvy. Trump’s RNC Convention speech was, essentially, a string of Tweets. It was one-liner after one liner, almost all of which were angry. You could hear the Caps Lock button stuck in his thoat.

9:49pm
Wrapping up…still lots more thoughts percolating…but some summary before I run out of time:

-Trump’s brilliance as a manipulator of social media is tied to an understanding of the “echo-chamber” nature of the beast. Trump’s online audience is an active one, but it is one that has a very curated list of bookmarks in its browser and followers or friends in its follower/friends list. It is all Trumpish ideology, all the time

-Trump’s attempts to bring these logics and strategies into the general election are working as well as they did in the primary for keeping our attention on him — but not as well for poll growth as he’d have probably hoped. He’s reached the limits of his audience, he’s touched the edge of the echo chamber. He need not adopt Hillary’s more moderate rhetorical style or blase´ social media strategy to advance, but neither can he solely rely on Twitter-logics going forward. It seems that the country is not yet ready for that kind of candidate to be president — but Trump has shown us that we are much closer than we thought.

9:53.
Bzzzzzzz.