January 3, 2017

Trump is the most unorthodox PEOTUS, no question, and that's perhaps the nicest thing we can say about this man. Presidential is not a very apt description of his behavior because his means of communication aren't that different from an old high school acquaintance or distant relative. Like an ordinary citizen, he manipulates social media just like that person who frames his life in a way that he believes will evoke envy and admiration. Trump is crafting an identity, and he manipulates people using free social media more effectively than anyone ever has.

The analysis of his choice of language, content of Tweets and style give much-needed insight into how he has commanded attention and power. Somehow, Donnie Tic Tac has been given a pass on dozens of career-ending transgressions with hard-hitting and often offensive Tweets that mislead people into believing he is something that he truly is not. He crafts his messages to create an identity of his choosing.

We can thank Nerdwriter's YouTube post for the analysis of the Tweets of Cheeto Mussolini. Here are a few of the noteworthy points included in this video:

Now that Trump has been president elect for 50 days, we don't get to hear much of Trump's speech anymore his interview appearances are dwindling and his press conferences are non-existent. But that doesn't mean he stopped using and manipulating language.

Thanks to info from the metadata we know that of the 220, 153 or 69% come from an Android phone, Trump's personal Samsung Galaxy. 59 or 27% come from an iPhone and 9 or 4% come from the Twitter web client, as in someone typing the tweets into a computer.

Of the 153 tweets that come from Trump's personal Samsung, not one shares a link, so that's a good rule of thumb if you want to determine which tweets are from him and which are huge majority of the Android tweets are Trump's personal thoughts or reactions then you can split them up in a few ways. For example 40 of those are positive or congratulatory in tone. 94 are negative or critical in tone and 19 are pretty much neutral like in a speech.

One thing Trump is really really good at is emotionally framing his tweets and most of them are emotionally charged, which is why 87% of them are negative or positive and tone. Trump doesn't want a sympathetic reader to spend any time at all deciphering how to feel about what he's saying.

A lot of people have mocked the way he concludes tweets with one or two-word exclamations like sad or too bad but these punctuations are actually powerful framing devices that lubricate the content of his message.they also reflect the key insight that Trump has knowingly or unknowingly about Twitter and texting as a form of communication. While tweets are technically a kind of writing, scholars have long theorized that computer-mediated communication more closely resembles speech than writing; where funky punctuation substitutes for conversational cues.

We're all in this age of social media, intimately familiar with this kind of behavior; we do it ourselves everyday. What we're not familiar with, not yet, at least, is this kind of thing from the most powerful person in the world. How it will fall out when you hold a position where even your words, desperately tweeted into the void, have global impact, but give it time.

Imagine if the media reported on the Tweets in the same flippant manner that Donald had written them? He deserves no more consideration than that hyperbolic relative who craves attention and says anything to get it.

The Drumpenführer is not Presidential by any stretch of the imagination. However, somehow this computer-phobic man used technology to trick a nation to giving him the keys to the Oval Office. As he would say, Sad!!

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