On January 20, 2017, very early in the morning, just after five-thirty, Donald Trump posted a tweet that was supposed to be the start of his presidency:
"Today it starts!" he wrote, "THE MOVEMENT CONTINUES - THE WORK BEGINS!"
On the same day, Trump took the oath to his office. Twitter, which quickly showed itself, should become its central communication tool.
Since then, 33 months have passed when Trump sold 11,887 tweets. This resulted in a large-scale data research of the "New York Times". The newspaper counted all tweets and retweets from Trump and evaluated their contents.
It turns out: Almost half of these text messages and postings consist of attacks and attacks, mostly on political opponents or other unpleasant persons. But Trump also distributed praise, but most of all to himself: In more than 2000 tweets, he was self-confessing himself. In more than 1700 short messages he spread or fired conspiracy theories.
A total of 5889 times Donald Trump has attacked a person or a fact. Above all, Trump uses Twitter to strike at his enemies and opponents, or against circumstances he does not like.
Most of these attacks are fired by the US President early in the morning or late in the evening, apparently especially when he has no counselors around. Especially in the period between six and ten in the morning, Trump is out on riot: Most often, Democrats are the target of his attacks, followed by news media ("enemies of the people"), previous governments, especially those of predecessor Barack Obama, and investigations that him could be dangerous: for example, the Russian affair or the possible impeachment proceedings against him which have been going on for several weeks.
Many of these attacks, the New York Times found, are apparently spontaneous. Others plan the US president but already days before. For example, in the case of former porn actress Stormy Daniels, with whom Trump is said to have had an affair. In October 2018 Trump is said to have announced his assistant to call her via Twitter "horse face". The consultants would have wanted to deter him then emphatically. A few days later, after Trump saw a report on Fox News about a federal judge who dismissed Daniel's action against him, he said, "Great, now I can hunt the horse face and its third-rate lawyer in the great state of Texas "he tweeted.
In the current year alone, Trump fired more assault tweets than in 2017 and 2018 together. He attacked at least 630 people directly.
Again and again, his tweets target minorities or immigrants. For example, if he asked his Twitter followers altogether 1159 times to take action against immigrants and for his planned border wall to Mexico.
In July, Trump summoned four Democratic Congressmen, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Rashida Tlaib, Ilhan Omar and Ayanna Pressley, to "go back to where they came from and help fix these totally damaged and crime-prone places . " The four women politicians all have a migration background. The tweet caused outrage around the world, the president was accused of racism.
.... and viciously telling the people of the United States, the greatest and most powerful nation on earth, how our government is to run. Why do not they go back and help fix the totally broken and crime. Then come back and show us how ....
- Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) July 14, 2019- The praise
The "New York Times" evaluation shows: More than anything else, Trump praises himself, for a total of 2026 times. In 16 tweets he referred to himself as "favorite" president.
Twitter is for Trump a kind of private survey tool and a echo chamber to self-confirm and to cheer his base: he takes likes as political approval. He attaches great importance to his follower number, he now has 66.5 million.
According to the research, less than a fifth of its digital followers are Americans eligible to vote. In addition, it's hard to say behind how many of these Twitter accounts are actually real people and not fake accounts or bots.
The New York Times found that nearly a third of Trump followers did not have biographical information in their profile and did not upload their own profile photo, indicating that the accounts are inactive or under-utilized. 14 percent of Trump followers have automatically generated user names.
- Conspiracy Theories and Fake News
With his tweets Trump uses the opportunity to propagate his policies, as well as conspiracy theories and fake news. According to the New York Times research, 1710 times he used conspiratorial language in his tweets or attempted to undermine confidence in democratic institutions.
More than 40 times he tweeted about alleged electoral fraud and a "rigged" electoral system, in more than 1400 tweets, Trump expressed doubts about Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election and the investigation into the affair.
The conspiracy theories he ventured included attacks on the credibility of journalists, intelligence agencies, and the US justice system.
The closer the presidential election campaign is to 2020 and the more the Democratic-led impeachment process intensifies, the more Twitter will gain in importance for Trump - new attacks can be expected every hour.
In the first two weeks of October alone, Trump tweeted more than 500 times.