The platform was in, it was clear that Donald Trump was missing – and he tweeted: “either a new election should be held or… results should be sent away”.
It’s familiar, but it wasn’t November 2020. It was February 2016.
Trump was just months into his presidential campaign and was already telling a story that he would tell countless times over the next five years, informing the world of the man’s character which the U.S. Senate will soon evaluate in the impeachment test.
Back then, Trump was trying to overthrow Ted Cruz’s influence. And he accused Iowa of counting the prime vote count.
“The State of Iowa should disallow Ted Cruz from the latest election on the grounds that he cheated – total fraud! Trump tweeted.
Donald Trump’s Americans now think he is the only Donald Trump to run in the 2015 election and the White House in 2016. He had some of the power to gather a loyal foundation based on the star-style. his repetitive experience, but on Twitter, he was particularly strong as a leading political life commentator himself.
In 2017, I started collecting all of his tweets, going back to June 16, 2015, the day he announced his application. I kept it up until January 8, 2021, the permanent Twitter day he canceled his account. I wanted to learn more about how he used language. But in those 20,301 tweets, I learned something more fundamental about how the 45th president of the United States used Twitter to tell his own story.
President of a storyteller
Trump was more proactive and negative than the politicians, journalists, news organizations and campaigners I compared – including Hillary Clinton’s Democratic presidential candidate Katy Tur of NBC -pro-Trump campaigner Linda Suhler and Black Lives campaigner Matter DeRay Mckesson.
However, the main difference I found was that Trump was among the most frequent users of storytelling techniques. Being a digital reporting researcher, that surprised me.
Storytelling, in general, is common among effective politicians, but Trump’s effort seems to have raised a high level of loyalty, distracted attention from negative issues and generally set the agenda. business for what the American people were debating.
Others have looked at this aspect of Trump’s claim, examining particular stories throughout his presidency, his storytelling style and even the astronomical parts of his populist narrative.
But I found a unique story structure that he used all the time.
Consistency among change
There were five main themes, which came up regularly – often all in one day:
- The very essence of the United States is undermined by invaders;
- True Americans will see this;
- I (Trump) am uniquely qualified to stop this attack;
- The establishment and its representatives hinder me;
- The US is in mortal danger because of this.
Taken together over time, this has created a story structure that I summarize in this way: “The establishment prevents me from defending you against invaders.”
The elements were flexible. The “establishment” could be anyone – Democrats, the NFL, media, corporate and even Vice President Mike Pence. The “invaders” were China, the coronavirus that first came out there, people crossing the US-Mexico border or Black Lives Matter fighters.
But the structure never changed: the country was in danger, Trump was able to defend America and he received the right support from “real” Americans.
That is what he said. How it worked was just as important.
Telling a different story
In terms of stories used by scholars, Trump “rewrote” the world in response to his themes. He took elements of news articles, viral videos, other tweets and whatever it took to build his messages. He took stories that were already in the public domain and gave them a new meaning according to his own story.
During the run up to the 2015 Republican primary, for example, the Growth Club spent $ 1 million running negative ads against Trump. But Trump, tweeting, rewrote the story: “The phony Club For Growth, which asked me in writing for $ 1,000,000 [I said no], now trying to make negative ads on me. Total hypocrites! ”The Club for Growth was an attractive and deceptive center; it was effective and powerful.
Trump would also rewrite characters into several messages, sometimes contradicting each other, according to the news of the day. Consider his tweet about China, which was first a partner, then a trade enemy and eventually an invader:
- 2017: “The failure of @nytimes hates the fact that I have developed a great relationship with World leaders like Xi Jinping, the President of China… ..”
- 2018: “We are not in a trade war with China, which was lost many years ago by the foolish, or incompetent, people who represented the USA. We now have a trade deficit of $ 500 billion a year, with intellectual property theft of another $ 300 billion. We can’t let this continue! ”
- 2020: “New China virus cases are up (as a result of major tests), deaths are down, ‘low and stable’. Fake News Media should cover this and also, that new job numbers are setting records! ”
Sticking to the script
Trump would usually tweet about the government, the media and corporate institutions, which would often become fodder for news coverage. The media often described the tweets as attacks and punch-punching. But on closer reading, they were only responses to criticism or bad news. They were reporting something on a regular basis, like a reporter would.
But his redesign of reality through his own lens may have played a part in Trump’s downfall. The attacks, all the information turns, all the fears, may have thrown enough people into major states to make sure it is defeated.
When that issue hit, Trump’s narrative framework didn’t change: he multiplied and multiplied, eating everything and everyone who didn’t support what many have been up to. announcing the Great Lie – election held against:
- January 3, 2021: “I spoke to Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger yesterday about Fulton County and voter fraud in Georgia. He was unwilling, or unable, to answer questions such as the ‘ballot under the table’ scam, ballot destruction, state ‘voters’, dead voters, and more. He has no clue! ”
- January 6, 2021: “Mike Pence lacked confidence in what should be done to protect our Country and Constitution, allowing States to prove a set of corrected facts, not the false or misleading ones that have been ask them to confirm beforehand. The USA wants the truth! ”
Way to the end
There is no single line from Trump’s speech or tweet that is going to be a smoking gun urging his followers to violence.
But he helped set the scene for the Capitol attack. The most famous was on 19 December 2020:
Peter Navarro releases a 36 – page report claiming that election fraud is ‘more than enough’ to influence Trump… Brilliant report by Peter. Statistically impossible that you lost the 2020 Election. Major protest in DC on 6 January. Be there, be wild!
The way Trump created this tweet represents how he rewrote things to tell his own story. He already took something in the debate, the Navarro report, and used it in a way that shaped the logic of the “stop theft” campaign.
Trump didn’t have to design #StopTheSteal – just put it into the existing narrative structure. Other politicians, including Producer Marjorie Taylor Greene, adopted Trump’s general structure for their own tweets.
However, the last tweet from his account before it was closed does not answer any of his common topics. It’s also one of the few times the tweet seems to tell a more traditional story. “For all who ask, I will not go to the Inauguration on January 20” concludes with a great story.
Michael Humphrey is Associate Professor of Journalism and Media Communications at Colorado State University.
This article originally appeared on An Còmhradh.