Now that he’s been banned we can say it: Donald Trump was a genius at Twitter
On8 January, Twitter indefinitely suspended the account of one Donald J Trump, president of the United States. Banning Trump from Twitter is a little like banning E coli from your large intestine: even if he never comes back, the memories will be enough.
Trump used the social media platform in a way that no figure in American government has ever managed before. Between last November and 6 January, when a mob of his supporters briefly overran the US Capitol and interrupted the certification of the 2020 electoral college vote, he used it to whip his followers into a frenzy. The riot was the reprehensible end to an extraordinary online career. Over the course of his presidency, Trump did for Twitter what James Dean did for the opentop sports car, making a cultural touchstone of a vehicle that ultimately destroyed him.
In the wake of his suspension, some have suggested Trump was the greatest Twitter user – or “poster” – of all time. I’m not sure that’s true. It raises the question of what great posting is. The first criterion is intangible: great posters are very much themselves, not just communicating ideas but iterating with each tweet a character – one that offers both a candid presentation of their thoughts and a knowing, semi-ironic performance of them. The second criteria is that lots of people read it. By these metrics, the greatest Twitter user of all time is probably @dril, an anonymous account that has accumulated 1.6 million followers by posting stuff like this:
Dril’s Isil tweet spawned a Twitter cliche: users now commonly remark that “you do not, under any circumstances, gotta hand it to them” in situations where a public figure is forced to walk back a previous statement. If such influence is the measure of success as a poster, then you do, under these circumstances, gotta hand it to Trump: his Twitter account truly shaped the culture.
Consider the Trumpian Sad. Trump first concluded a tweet with the exclamation “Sad!” in December 2011, in reference to his belief that former Walter Mondale campaign manager Bob Beckel should not appear on Fox News. His use of this odd affectation increased after he announced his candidacy for president. A classic example from 25 November 2015:
“The numbers at the @nytimes are so dismal, especially advertising revenue, that big help will be needed fast. A once great institution – SAD!”
The key, here, is that he is not actually sad. The inherent humour of using “Sad!” as an exclamation – a thing people simply do not blurt out when they are overcome – is compounded by the sense that Trump is in fact revelling in the (imagined/falsified) decline of the New York Times, a newspaper he makes no secret of despising. This crocodile-tears expression would become a motif of his posting during his presidency, and ending tweets with “Sad!” became a platform-wide joke as a result. Trump similarly propagated countless other phrases, including the infamous “haters and losers”.
This tweet from 2013 is as close to Dril as anyone else ever got, although, as with many of Trump’s successes, it’s impossible to say whether he did it on purpose. Trump made “haters and losers” a kind of catchphrase of his Twitter activity during his presidency, despite the fact that it is a phrase more appropriate to the villain in a children’s story than the president of the United States. This kind of off-tone communication, though, was the secret to Trump’s Twitter success. Here is the president on 30 April 2020:
“Lyin’ Brian Williams of MSDNC, a Concast Scam Company, wouldn’t know the truth if it was nailed to his wooden forehead. Remember when he lied about his bravery in a helicopter? Totally made up story. He’s a true dummy who was thrown off Network News like a dog. Stay tuned!”
It is true that any dog who made it on to a network news broadcast would be thrown off immediately, but this message – full of axe-grinding inaccuracies – still does not quite fit the comportment one expects from a head of state. He often used arbitrary capitalisation, adding to the jarring effect. As president, Trump was criticised for routinely committing spelling and usage errors in his tweets, but this criticism ignored the fact that such errors were a feature, not a bug – as members of his staff admitted to the Boston Globe in 2018. In the same way that getting a text from your mother that uses “u” in place of “you” disrupts your image of a lifelong figure of authority, seeing the president use Twitter to talk about television, “covfefe” and “losers” shatters the aura of the office. For much of the American public, this shattering was a crisis, but for his supporters, it was a release.
For the most part, politicians’ Twitter accounts are boring. They lack the off-the-cuff quality that is the principle pleasure of following a public figure on social media as opposed to in the news. Trump’s genius was to use Twitter the way ordinary people use social media: poorly. His typos, his regular indulgence in slander, his unthinking repetition of inaccurate news from obviously unreliable websites: these are precisely the problems official communications from public figures have historically sought to avoid.
By embracing them – by calling a journalist a dummy and his political opponents losers, by complaining about whatever was on TV and apparently not bothering to read it over before he hit send – Trump made his Twitter feed relatable in a way more calculated communicators never could. He joined a time-honoured mode of discourse that I call Just Sayin’ Stuff: the practice of speaking as an end in itself, with little regard for the truth of what one says or how it might affect other people. Just Sayin’ Stuff is the category of behaviour that encompasses water-cooler banter and the moment, just before the movie starts, when you lean over and tell your date that the CIA runs Hollywood now. It is speech at its least serious, and Trump indulged it in a public forum, as president of the United States.
This behaviour was insanely irresponsible. It ended in a mob assault that interrupted the normal functioning of government and got several people killed. Trump succeeded on Twitter by treating what he said as though it didn’t matter, and in doing so, he ironically brought about the one outcome most users cannot imagine: what he said did matter, at a level that shaped not just online discourse but historical events. The argument for Trump as the greatest Twitter user of all time is that he made the platform relevant. The lesson, probably, is that Twitter should never be so relevant again.
Dan Brooks writes essays, fiction and commentary from Missoula, Montana