How Trump Got Bad at Twitter
https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2019/01/01/how-trump-got-bad-at-twitter-223572
The late-December tweet from @realDonaldTrump was brief and absurd: “Farm Bill signing in 15 minutes! #Emmys #TBT.” It was accompanied by
a clip from the 2005 Emmy awards in which the future leader of the free world, wearing a straw hat and overalls, sings the “Green Acres” theme song with actress Megan Mullally. The internet responded with predictable shock, tinged with mockery. But there was also a hint of excitement, maybe even relief: Had Trump gotten his Twitter mojo back?
That tweet felt like an exception to one of the biggest surprises in American politics this year. Donald J. Trump — the man who redefined the possibilities of social media, single-handedly turning a chatty platform into a must-read political assault weapon—has become bad at Twitter.
You wouldn’t know this from news coverage, since reporters still count on the occasional shocking Trump tweet to drive the news cycle, and he occasionally obliges. (He changed U.S.-Syria policy in one tweet, and used another to bump Defense Secretary Jim Mattis out of office early.) His tendency to govern by tweet has also shifted other politicians’ behavior, making the formerly staid backroom business of D.C.
feel like an online free-for-all.
But if you still think of Trump as the tweeter-in-chief, master of the pithy insult and well-placed exclamation point, just visit his feed. The crisp, unpredictable tweets from the start of his presidency have largely become rambling and verbose. His account is weirdly turgid, loaded with ponderous attacks on his perceived enemies and obscure multipart arguments about his legal situation. At other times, it veers as close as Trump has ever sounded to Washingtonesque.
In case you haven’t been reading faithfully, a typical Trump tweet, circa late 2018, reads something like this:
We signed two pieces of major legislation this week, Criminal Justice Reform and the Farm Bill. These are two Big Deals, but all the Fake News Media wants to talk about is “the mistake” of bringing our young people back home from the Never Ending Wars. It all began 19 years ago!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump)
December 23, 2018
Or this:
While the disgusting Fake News is doing everything within their power not to report it that way, at least 3 major players are intimating that the Angry Mueller Gang of Dems is viciously telling witnesses to lie about facts & they will get relief. This is our Joseph McCarthy Era!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump)
November 28, 2018
Note the defensive posture, the multiple messages jumbled into one, the catchphrases breathlessly piled atop one another. This Trump sounds more like a kid trying to talk his way out of detention than the communications savant who took over the 2016 campaign 140 characters at a time.
That talent isn’t totally gone. The president still manages the occasional Trumpian turn of phrase (on December 7, he called former Secretary of State Rex Tillerson “
dumb as a rock”) and he can still use Twitter as a potent weapon to redirect public attention. Indeed, in the days surrounding Trump’s Worst Week Ever—the resignation of his Defense secretary, a plunging stock market, a looming government shutdown, ominous advances in the Mueller investigation—the president’s feed was stocked with diversions. He posted a
rendering of a “Steel Slat Barrier” border wall, in the Modern King’s Landing aesthetic. He delivered one-liners designed to send his foes into paroxysms of fact-checking and fury. (“I’ve done more damage to ISIS than all recent presidents … not even close!”)
Not long ago, that was just a typical week for Trump. Now it’s the exception. The rambling tweets have returned with a vengeance, and the clutter-to-clarity ratio is rising every day. This change isn’t just a curiosity: Twitter has always seemed a direct wire into the president’s brain. So if his tweets are descending into unintelligible self-absorption, what does that say about his frame of mind?
IT’S NOT MUCH of an overstatement to say that Trump wouldn’t be president without that Twitter feed. Around the midpoint of the campaign—when the idea began to wedge, in the dark shadows of people’s minds, that his candidacy wasn’t just an oddball piece of performance art but a viable, growing force—his ability to hijack the national conversation on Twitter, over and over, proved that he had nailed something essential about modern-day political communications.
Voters hunger for authenticity, a quality increasingly hard to project in the era of the press release, the 24-hour cable show and the massive political consultancy class. Washington’s standard media dance had become the opposite of spontaneous. The rules of expression were clear: Whatever swearing or ranting or touchdown dancing you might do behind closed doors, your official communication downplayed conflict, respected opponents, bent over to give credit wherever it was due, and ensured that every word was committee-drafted and vetted to the hilt. Candidates’ social media accounts followed largely the same rules, leading to a lot of supremely dull Twitter accounts.
Trump’s media skills were forged in the far-less-polite confines of the New York Post’s Page 6, and he was different from the start. The man who became nationally famous by saying “You’re fired” understood the power of a direct personal attack, and the value of a slogan that could be boiled down to fit on a hat. Throughout his candidacy and well into his presidency, he wielded Twitter in just that way. It was easy to track his movements and mood though his spurts of Twitter activity; we learned he was an obsessive viewer of “Fox and Friends” due to his tendency to tweet the contents in real time. And like a stand-up comic testing material, he used Twitter to launch and deploy his catchphrases: Fake News, No Collusion, Rigged Witch Hunt.
The sheer volume of Trump’s tweets, though — at this point his account has logged some 40,000 posts — began to make each one less essential. As it was early in his Twitter career, filler is abundant. He recommends a lot of
books, many of them by
Fox News personalities. For a stretch leading up to the midterms, he used his feed almost exclusively to name-check Republican candidates; nearly every tweet felt perfunctory.
And as he has grown busier with the work of public office, the voice of the press release has crept in. He uses his feed for milquetoast updates on official business:
Statement from China: “The teams of both sides are now having smooth communications and good cooperation with each other. We are full of confidence that an agreement can be reached within the next 90 days.” I agree!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump)
December 7, 2018
He offers quasi-presidential responses to disasters, holding hands with Democratic opponents after the California wildfires:
Thank you
@JerryBrownGov. Look forward to joining you and
@GavinNewsom tomorrow in California. We are with you!
https://t.co/UuXWAadmov
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump)
November 17, 2018
And he has begun to post stilted video messages, which feature him standing on the White House grounds or in front of a backdrop of flags. They feel a bit like hostage videos: a deadness in the eyes, an absence of joy.
Let’s not do a shutdown, Democrats - do what’s right for the American People!
pic.twitter.com/bZg07ZKQqo
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump)
December 13, 2018
PART OF THE BLAME lies with Twitter itself. If you want to pinpoint the arrival of Boring Trump Twitter, it might trace back to November 7, 2017, the day the platform doubled the maximum length of a tweet from 140 to 280 characters. Trump busted out of his 140-character box the very next day, with a
run-on sentence about his trip to Asia:
Getting ready to make a major speech to the National Assembly here in South Korea, then will be headed to China where I very much look forward to meeting with President Xi who is just off his great political victory.
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump)
November 8, 2017
The new character limit meant that ..
Joanna Weiss is editor of Experience magazine.
