Abstract
Many Americans find Trump’s Twitter activity both mesmerizing and concerning. Not only is social media—and Twitter in particular—critical to how Trump communicates with the public, it also comprises a major part of his political strategy. The question is, what political benefits does Trump receive from tweeting? This chapter presents our argument. Specifically, we argue that the primary goal of Trump’s Twitter activity is to seek attention. Though he engages in disputes with others on Twitter and he tweets to attack his political opponents, these activities are secondary to his desire to solidify support among his followers on Twitter (and those who follow them) and to encourage them to react to his tweets.
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Trump, Donald J. “Twitter/@realDonaldTrump: Everywhere Marie Yovanovitch went turned bad. She started off in Somalia, how did that go? Then fast forward to Ukraine, where the new Ukrainian President spoke unfavorably about her in my second phone call with him. It is a U.S. President’s absolute right to appoint ambassadors.” November 15, 2019, 7:01 AM. https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/1195356198347956224
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People who know Trump seem to confirm that Trump personally was not bothered by the “attacks” on him at the Dinner. In an interview with FRONTLINE’s Jim Gilmore, Jim Dowd, who was Trump’s former publicity manager for The Apprentice , said, “At the correspondents’ dinner when Obama was really giving him a hard time, he did call me afterwards and, you know, he was okay. I mean, he got the fact that, you know, him being there was going to cause a ruckus and if he’s going to be there, he’d rather be the star, so to speak, of the show than not. In reality, he didn’t have any big issues with what Obama was saying. He’s got a very thick skin” (Wiser 2016).
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Ouyang, Y., Waterman, R.W. (2020). Trump Tweets: A Desire for Attention. In: Trump, Twitter, and the American Democracy. The Evolving American Presidency. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-44242-2_2
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