Thursday, September 22, 2016

Twitter-Crazed Trump Vs. Calculating Clinton

Even in the political world, the “always on” phenomena continues to exist, thrive and play the game of give and take with the audience that it is directing its content to. In politics, the snarkiness, opinionated shade throwing, and defensive subtweeting is often kicked up a notch to a borderline blood-bath level, and this is not only between fellow Twitter users in the audience, but also between the politicians themselves. This point is made overly clear in Matt Villarreal’s bog post on “Always On Politics”.
"Politics has become an even nastier battle-field where no ones opinions are respected but rather shot down in an instant. Even Donald Trump, as shown above, is bashing Hilary Clinton. He is recognizing the fact that she has taken some time off of Twitter and the campaign and makes the assumption that she is sleeping. Our candidates are even expressing personal opinion on their own campaign!” said Villarreal. 

 The use of social media has intensified from the beginning of time, but most notably and specifically with each presidential election. The most noticeable shift in this social media phenomenon in connection to political campaigns was during the Reagan campaign via his use of direct mail to his current and potential voters. This focused and selective use of media to potential voters has only grown and become more and more personal. Yes, they know where you are, who you are, what you have done, what you will do; accept it.  As Hannah Alfred states in her blog, the public has not only gotten more comfortable with social media use, but so have politicians. "A major observation through journalists and social media is how they are less afraid to voice their opinion or hide facts,” (Alfred). The most obvious example of such comfort is embodied by, yes, you guessed it, Donald Trump. 
This is typical Trump. Who actually cares about the placement of private planes? Does this mean anything beyond the obvious pettiness that it is? I am sure Hillary is trying to be just like Trump and this is obviously her best way of acting in a Trump fashion. Being on in a political way is not always political in the sense that the information being sent out is serious and valuable to our lives; it can also be absolute madness.


For some candidates, social media plays a more crucial role in the campaign that they lead than others. The type, amount, and tone of the posts that are shared out to the public says a lot about the candidate, their political views, and their views reagarding social media. Those that use social media more often, in more abrasive and uncensored ways, like Donald Trump, it can be argued that he is putting a lot of trust in either himself to be able to recover from potential backlash from the public, or in social media itself as a structural component as a “gatekeeper” to control the message he is attempting to send. From every tweet he has ever made, himself personally, this does not seem to be a thought in his mind, for he does not make any significant attempt to recover from tweets gone bad; and if he does, it is not from him directly, but rather his social media team. You can tell by the time of day the tweet is tweeted out, the vocabulary and tone that is used, and the lack of exclamation points within. 

 However, an argument can be made that he is trusting Twitter as a structure to control his own personal message because every tweet that he makes always sparks controversy, no matter if it is in a positive or negative way, and this seems to be all he truly cared about. As Matt puts it  "In a way he has become more successful on Twitter for causing arguments amongst his followers,” (Villarreal). He is the bully from fifth grade that everyone simultaneously likes and hates because thy fear for both their lives and their level of cool. What it seems that Trump is actually doing is falling into stereotypical Twitter-like behavior. which is perfectly described in Controlling the Message by Farrar-Meyers and Vaughn. “Twitter is defined by “look at me” and “don’t be boring”,” (Lawrence).

So here we see the bully in action. Columnists are “wacky”, The New York Times is “nuts” and a “laughingstock rag”. His vocabulary is phenomenal, is it not? His retweets and pictures embedded in his feed are also incredibly on point. I hope you catch the sarcasm. His tweets and political on-ness is incredibly juvenile, unprofessional, and is a pride strutting show that gets us as Americans nowhere in the sense of real political questions, issues, or concerns in the race to the finish line, but it undoubtedly shows his extreme level of comfort with using Twitter to speak his mind in a completely unfiltered way. May we never forget his infamous “I love Hispanics” tweet on Cinco De Mayo. Shudders.
While an embarrassing majority of Americans believe that Trump can do no wrong and live for tweets such as these, he is not really getting to the issues that actually matter, and rather focusing on the petty fluff that strokes his ego. It is hard to know what exactly is the truth via Trump, for his tweets are not always static, or via his social media team, for there is a definite distinction between the these two sets of tweets. As Megan Larson describes it in her blog post “The Tweeting Trump”, "Trump has no filter and says what he thinks and then his staff comes in and does damage control,” (Larson). Trump is unavoidably separated from his own campaign due to how he interacts on Twitter and the persona that he creates there.

 Hillary Clinton’s presence on Twitter, however, is completely different from Trump’s, and shows a different perspective of how politicians can be “on” in a more grown up, stereotypically political way. Clinton and her social media team shows an understanding for what their direct and potential audience wants with easily shareable links, retweets, and pictures in a clean and professional looking feed. Clinton’s approach is entirely different and it works in its own way. Clinton makes the distinction between her personal tweets and her social media team’s tweets with the signature “-H” so her viewers know what they are getting from her Twitter page. The tweets that are signed by Clinton herself and those that are not have a consistent tone and message throughout, unlike Trump’s tweets.



Just like normal, everyday people, politicians have to be skillful at being “always on”; even if that means ranting via name-calling. Side-eye at Trump. Each politician thought each election has had to conform to or transform the social media world to best fit them, their campaign, the individuals they are trying to reach, and the goals that they are attempting to share. When it comes to being always on, politicians easily epitomize the more extreme levels of this concept.
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