It’s tempting to view American President Donald Trump’s Twitter postings as a constant stream of verbal diarrhea, but a new study from the University of Birmingham highlights how his usage has changed over the course of his presidency.
The researchers attempted to differentiate their analysis from previous studies of Trump’s tweets by focusing less on the topics and sentiment of his tweets, and more on the range of rhetorical strategies he uses.
The researchers downloaded Trump’s tweets between 2009 and 2018 to explore any patterns in grammatical co-occurence. The analysis revealed four distinct styles used in Trump’s tweets:
- Conversational
- Campaigning
- Advisory
- Engaged
The tweets suggest a range of different communication strategies underpin Trump’s use of the platform, especially during his presidential campaign. These strategies differ depending on his goals, whether they are defending criticism of him or his campaign, deflecting controversies, appealing to various audiences or attacking opponents.
Of course, it’s quite possible that not all of the tweets sent from Trump’s Twitter account were written by him, or indeed by the same members of his team. Equally, it’s difficult to gauge just how much thought and planning went into each tweet, especially given Trumps’ tendency to tweet at strange times of the day and seemingly shoot from the hip.
“Regardless of one’s political persuasion or one’s opinion of Donald Trump, we believe it is of critical importance to understand the unique and ultimately effective communication strategy Trump and his team implemented on social media during the 2016 campaign,” the authors explain. “This study presents the first detailed linguistic analysis of the style used on the Donald Trump Twitter account. We find that the account shows clear patterns of stylistic variation over time and argue that these results provide a window into the communication strategy of Trump and his team during the campaign.”
