Trump Was Our First Social Media President. And It Was Awful
By: Lance Ulanoff
Tags: Technology, Twitter, Social Media, Trump, Analysis

Trump Was Our First Social Media President. And It Was Awful

Photo by Joshua Hoehne on Unsplash

Not long after the utter shock of the 2016 presidential election subsided and I could see clearly again, I tried assessing Donald Trump’s past, current, and future Twitter career. I was part prescient and also wildly off because I couldn’t imagine the norms-smashing presence he’d be on the national and international stage and on social media.

I don’t think anyone could have anticipated Trump’s bull-in-a-china-shop approach to social media discourse and how it would roil Twitter, the media, and a stunned populace.

In those weeks after the election, but before his inauguration, I don’t think even Trump knew exactly how or if he would use his favorite digital bully pulpit. His tweets at the time put that split psyche on full display. On November 9, 2016, he tweeted:

Only to follow it a day later with:

It was that same day, however, that Trump sat, for the very first time, with President Barack Obama:

This was rare praise for a man whose policies Trump would spend the next four years dismantling. It was also rare praise from Trump for a world leader who was not a dictator.

Still, there were signs that Trump might be easing into a more Presidential Twitter mode, doing something that even Obama really hadn’t had a chance to do.

Even though Obama was considered something of a social media President (his first election campaign was among the first to leverage social media), he wasn’t our first “Tweeting President.” As I noted four years ago, Obama rarely tweeted on his own from the @POTUS account. These days, Obama is a much more active social presence on his own personal account.

Trump was supposed to take over the @POTUS account in 2017 (or at least his people were), but I should’ve realized that Trump would never give up his personal account. Few things (if any) are more important to Trump than his personal brand. It’s why he plasters his name in gold on all of his properties. Why would he ever give up @realDonaldTrump in favor of an anonymous @POTUS?

The first sign that I was so very wrong was when I tried to imagine a Trumpian Tweet in the @POTUS account. It would’ve been like graffiti on the iconic U.S. Capital dome. Trump could not be “Trump” on the President’s Twitter account. Trump could and would be real in his own account.

Despite this, I waited for Trump to slowly shut down @realDonaldTrump. I honestly believed something had to change because of two key and intractable issues: power and equanimity.

Trump’s habit of going after enemies on Twitter when he was a real estate mogul, sometimes TV personality, and private citizen was awful, but one would hope those under attack could give as good as they got. President Trump’s Twitter attacks automatically became state matters, and anyone who tried to counterattack would be stepping right into the sights of the Secret Service. Instead of recognizing this and pulling back, Trump leaned in for the duration of his Presidency and used this power imbalance to his advantage.

And then there was this quaint chestnut from my 2016 post:

A president, really any leader, can’t possibly lead if his constituents are privy to every one of his micro-emotions. I know live-tweeting his campaign worked for Trump, but that simply can’t be his social media strategy going forward.

Incredibly, I wasn’t laughing hysterically when I wrote that. I could not conceive of a U.S. President tying the American populace like a tail on the kite of his wildly whipping emotions. But that’s exactly what Trump did, and not just to U.S. Citizens. Since 2017, the world has learned of key policy decisions, appointments, firings, shattered agreements, and broken relations through Trump’s firehose Twitter account.

There’ve been a few lighthearted moments, like when Trump late-night butt-tweeted “Covfefe” and even joined along in making fun of it, and more recently when Trump threatened to veto a defense bill and called for, among other things, “troupe reductions in foreign lands.” Sadly, these entertaining malapropisms were but brief respites from hair-raising tweet storms that tipped the world on its axis.

Trump kept tweeting while those whom you might expect to deliver an occasional tweet kept mum. Son-in-law, Senior Adviser, and head of White House Office of American Innovation, Jared Kushner, has not once in his 4-year tenure tweeted to his 131k followers (he started with 37k). Meanwhile, Trump’s actual son, Donald Trump Jr., has increasingly tweeted in the Trump mold to his 6.4M followers. Trump, by the way, has 88.6M followers, though that number is apparently slowly dwindling. Mine is, too, and I’ve mused that when Trump leaves office, Twitter may, due to lack of constant attention and controversy, fold in on itself and, like a digital black hole, suck back in all of Trump’s tweets before disappearing with an audible pop that sounds, naturally, like the tweet of a bluebird.

In hindsight, I realize that Trump is most successful, at least among his loyal constituents, when he’s unfiltered. His hatred of the media, which started before his election but grew by leaps and bounds over the course of his one-term presidency, meant that he wouldn’t trust any of the stories written about his policies and administration to deliver his true essence. Trump unvarnished is what got him elected and what he thought would keep him in office through an impeachment effort and, yes, even a mismanaged pandemic.

Even though his cherished Twitter account has, in a way, failed him on this final leg, when Trump felt assured of reelection, Trump has not abandoned it. If anything, he’s doubled down on his Twitter activity and is tweeting with, if possible, even more abandon, once again using the account to further a Trump idea of conspiracy, deception, and outright theft.

The calculation evident in Twitter Trump of 2015 and even 2019, though, is gone. The tweets are scattershot and full of invective, targeting enemies and former friends. One might say that this is, as it ever was, Trump in full.

I’ve always said that my own Twitter account is part of me, maybe the best or “cleverest” part of me, but it is by no means all of me. There is much I choose not to share. Trump’s Twitter account, whether he manages some or all of it is him, him, him.

As I said in 2016. “Trump may prove to be our first, true social media president and, as of this moment, that is not looking like a good thing.” I’ve never been so sorry to be so right.