The Truth About Donald Trump's Social Media Strategy (it sucks!)
For four years the President of the United States, an Ivy League graduate and billionaire in his seventies, chose to communicate with the American people largely through tweets that would feel more appropriate coming from a racist middle-school bully with a shaky grasp on grammar and spelling and deeply disturbing anger issues.
From 2016 to 2020 disgraced, twice-impeached ex-president Donald Trump used Twitter, a silly, society-destroying website he professes to hate, to crudely insult his enemies, bully members of his own party and talk down to the cultists who voted for him.
Trump understandably sees the MAGA flock as a motley aggregation of dim-witted mouth breathers so unconscionably dense that they need everything spelled out for them in the crudest possible terms.
The sad part is that Trump’s cynical, emotionally stunted social media strategy of treating his followers like slow children and anyone who disagreed with him as the evil enemy of the American people proved wildly successful.
Trump won in no small part due to his Twitter ramblings. When he was kicked off Twitter, a stupid fucking social media website for babies it was seen as almost as bad, if not worse, than getting impeached twice.
The ex-president could give a fuck about multiple impeachments but he REALLY seemed obsessed with Twitter, despite his ostensible hatred for the site.
Trump wandered in the wilderness after getting the boot from Twitter. He sent out press releases in the same style and tone as his tweets but nobody gave a fuck because he wasn’t the president anymore. He might still be far and away the most powerful and influential figure in the Republican Party but ex-presidents, by definition, are infinitely less powerful or important than presidents in office.
It was impossible to ignore the tweets of Donald Trump when he was president of the United States. It’s easy, however, to ignore the tweet-like utterances of Trump today because he just does not matter the way he once did.
Sometimes, however, a Trump social media missive will become news. When Ivanka Trump recently stated publicly that she accepted former Attorney General Bill Barr’s assertion that the 2020 election was not stolen it made Trump very, very angry.
It made him angry because Barr was a ferociously loyal soldier for much of his time in office. The first thing he did, after all, was look at a Comey Report that stated that Trump undoubtedly did a bunch of shady-ass, probably criminal, utterly unethical shit but it would probably be difficult to convict him with the current available evidence and confidently announced that it exonerated Trump in every way.
Like a number of Trump’s minions, Barr finally drew the line at treason, at doing things that are illegal as well as unethical and might get him thrown in jail and disgrace his family for generations to come.
So he became persona non grata as far as Trump is concerned. Ivanka’s exact words on Barr’s statement that the election was not stolen, “It affected my perspective. I respect Attorney General Barr so I accepted what he said.”
That is the very specific context of a message that Trump sent out on his own Truth Social site, “Ivanka Trump was not involved in looking at, or studying, Election results. She had long since checked out and was, in my opinion, only trying to be respectful to Bill Barr and his position as Attorney General (he sucked!)”
This statement is as important and historic as anything on Truth Social can possibly get. It’s one for the ages. Ivanka is, after all, clearly Trump’s favorite child, if not his favorite person in the world. For her to not parrot his feverish claims that the 2020 election was stolen has to feel like the very worst kind of betrayal.
So the ex-president tries to contextualize it in the most flattering possible terms for himself and his daughter. He says that it’s ultimately not Ivanka’s fault, really, that she’s so oblivious that she doesn’t realize that the blatant theft of the 2020 presidential election is both very, very real and also the most important thing in the history of the world.
Ivanka is tragically not doing the research and being as much of a badasss renegade as her dad, so she still foolishly has respect both for the job of Attorney General and also the man her father personally selected to be his Attorney General.
Trump sees this respect as a profound weakness, if not a fatal flaw that blinded Ivanka to the incontrovertible truth of the Democrat’s deception and treachery.
The final two words of the missive are the most revealing and fascinating to me. In a missive that would be analyzed and shared all over the world, and treated as news, the former president’s criticism of his former Attorney General are a shouted, “he sucked!”
In case the dumb dumbs on Truth Social couldn’t understand fancy words and ideas about respect and loyalty, he’d dumb it down for them by outright stating that Bill Barr sucks. Trump doesn’t say that Barr likes to poop his pants and then kiss his own butt and also that he likes to eat his own boogers, but I would not be surprised if there were drafts of the Truth Social post containing those sentiments.
When Donald Trump was in office it became distressingly commonplace for the most powerful man in the world to communicate like a bratty ten year old. That was his communication style, and his followers fucking loved it. They loved the vulgarity. They loved the perverse informality. They loved the profanity and mean-spiritedness.
And they loved that the ex-president never wasted words being formal and respectful when he could just write that someone they themselves appointed to a job of supreme importance sucked.
A whole lot of crazy ass shit became normalized during the four year bad acid trip that was Trump’s presidency. At the risk of being perhaps insufficiently eloquent or worldly, it sucked!
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