Both as a candidate and as President, Trump’s Twitter account has always been a weapon at hand to blow up the news cycle and keep the spotlight on him. Could Trump be Trump without his Twitter account?
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Let’s say for a moment that next week, Twitter decides to pull the plug completely on Donald Trump’s account. They’ve decided, for whatever reason, to forego an escalating tit-for-tat between themselves and the President over the course of this year’s campaign season and just get rid of @RealDonaldTrump altogether. What impact would that have on the country and Donald Trump’s re-election campaign? Just how much does the President rely on Twitter to speak to his supporters and could losing Twitter be a death-knell to his re-election campaign?
There’s little doubt about just how much Trump’s campaign relied on “earned media” in 2016. In the Republican Primary, especially, he was able to hijack the process largely by dominating news cycles and taking up all the oxygen in the room through the constant ownership of the headlines. While a lot of this is thanks to news media who willingly gave him singular attention, Trump’s Twitter account was always a weapon at hand to blow up the news cycle and keep the spotlight on him.
Donald Trump’s use of Twitter as President has been very similar. In fact, he has come to rely on Twitter even more as a tool to circumvent traditional means of communication (and likely the objections of his own staff). The President’s Twitter account is raw, unfiltered id, the red meat of Trump’s ego, showmanship, and his narcissistic desire (nay, demand) to always be the center of attention.
So, what if the President lost his spotlight? What if he was forced to rely exclusively on traditional means of media, ones that could, and likely would, filter his over-the-top and obsessive opining? What if he lost the ability to blow up the news cycle on any given day and could no longer force-feed his narrative on Twitter’s platform? Just how much damage would losing Twitter do to Donald Trump’s efforts to get re-elected?
Well, let’s just say there’s a reason why Twitter is calling Trump’s bluff. They don’t need him, but he definitely needs them. The American people have become growingly fatigued of having Trump in the headlines every day, and absent his ability to force attention on himself using Twitter, people just might start talking about other things (to Trump’s horror).
We can be relatively certain that, while the media still can’t seem to fully control themselves with their obsessive coverage of everything Trump says and does, the wall-to-wall coverage of Donald Trump in 2016 is unlikely to repeat itself. Trump’s rallies are not going to be broadcast unfiltered and in full on CNN, live debates between Trump and Biden are seeming more and more unlikely, and a myriad of policies have been put in place over the last four years on social media platforms that make it increasingly difficult for fake news, misinformation, and unsavory actors to push false-narratives and overwhelm the conversation through disinformation campaigns.
The President’s Twitter account is chaos theory. With it, there’s no telling what might happen. Without it, things get a lot more boring, quiet, and typical. And, Trump is not a person who thrives on boring, quiet, and typical. Trump’s brand is chaos, and Twitter is his biggest asset when it comes to stirring the pot.
So, Trump may bluster and threaten and whine about Twitter’s growing willingness to fact-check him and filter him, but at the end of the day he needs his Twitter account more than he needs anything else, both as a political tool and as an outlet for his serial self-absorption. I find it very unlikely that he will go through with anything that would risk him losing the cherished MacGuffin of the Trump narrative.
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