In Focus: Trump Tweets: Power and the Global Politics of Social Media
| Published date | 01 March 2021 |
| Author | Benjamin D. Hennig |
| Date | 01 March 2021 |
| DOI | 10.1177/20419058211000998 |
20 POLITICAL INSIGHT • MARCH 2021
In Focus
Trump Tweets: Power
and the Global Politics
of Social Media
Benjamin D. Hennig maps Donald Trump’s foreign policy through his favourite medium: Twitter.
‘This is what’s going on in the
age of Fake News,’ Donald
Trump tweeted in 2019.
‘People think they can say
anything and get away with it.’
Twitter was the 45th President of the
United States of America’s favoured means
of communication, and even policymaking.
He tweeted prolically – and often erratically
– until, in January, the social network
‘permanently suspended’ Trump’s account
‘due to the risk of further incitement to
violence’.
Trump’s Twitter ban came after a mob of
armed Trump supporters violently entered
the Capitol in Washington, just hours ahead
of the formal conrmation of then President-
Elect Joe Biden’s Electoral College victory
through Congress. For months after the
election, Trump had used his huge Twitter
platform to decry a ‘rigged election’. Now he
was o the platform for good.
Trump’s journey on Twitter started in May
2009 and, during more than a decade, he
sent over 50,000 tweets, as well as countless
more retweets of other people’s messages.
Trump tweeted 23,000 times after he was
elected President in November 2016. The
tweets are the storyline of the political
inheritance that Biden faces. Domestically, the
country is even more divided than it has ever
been before, while globally the traditional US
alliances are damaged as never before.
Much of Trump’s ‘foreign policy’ was
conducted via Twitter, often through early
morning tweets when the President was
out of his advisors’ reach. The maps opposite
show the result of a context analysis of
Trump’s tweets. They map countries in
proportion to the number of times they were
mentioned in tweets made by Donald Trump
between the 2016 and 2020 US presidential
elections. (The data excludes mentions of the
US itself.)
Since 2016 he has made 2,252 individual
references to other countries. A total of 92
countries were mentioned at least once. (No
signicant mentions of other countries were
made between the 2020 election and the
suspension of the account in January 2021.)
These maps are a reection of Trump’s
changing international outlook and reect
on some of the major global events that
dened his period in oce. The main map
summarises the entire four years, while the
smaller map series shows a snapshot of each
individual year in oce. The most mentioned
countries in his tweets were China, 19 per
cent (436 tweets) followed by Russia, 16 per
cent (367 tweets), North Korea, 8 per cent
(182 tweets), Mexico, 7 per cent (156 tweets)
and Ukraine 4 per cent (94 tweets).
Between winning the election on 8
November 2016 until the end of 2017, Trump
mentioned Russia the most (89 tweets),
followed by North Korea (57 tweets) and
China (47 tweets), Puerto Rico (33 tweets)
and China (21 tweets). In 2017, there was a
Special Counsel investigation into an alleged
collusion between Trump and the Russian
government, so that many of his tweets are
focused around that topic. In September
2017, Hurricane Maria hit the Caribbean and –
among other islands – caused Puerto Rico the
worst natural disaster in recorded history. As
a result of the hurricane in the autumn that
year, Puerto Rico, which is an unincorporated
US territory, did not only receive nancial aid
from Washington, but also a visit by President
Trump, accompanied by a considerable
number of his tweets.
The investigations against the Russia-
Trump connection kept Russia at the top of
Trump’s tweets in 2018 (155 tweets,), followed
by China (82 tweets), North Korea (80
tweets), Mexico (48 tweets) and Canada (31
tweets). While tweets about China, Mexico
and Canada dealt mainly with taris and a
looming trade war, North Korea made the list
due to the surprise summit of its leader Kim
Jong-Un with President Trump, taking place
in Singapore in 2018.
The escalating trade war with China
dominated the tweets in 2019, during which
a total of 54 countries were mentioned.
China was mentioned in 168 tweets, almost
double the number of the runners-up Russia
(85 tweets) and Mexico (77 tweets). In March
2019, the investigation into a Trump-Russia
conspiracy ended, which accounted for
most of Trump’s Russia-related tweets. In
the autumn, the Ukraine scandal broke
after Trump requested Ukrainian President
Volodymyr Zelensky to investigate Joe Biden
and his son. This sparked the scandal and put
Ukraine in Trump’s tweets (71 tweets). 2019
was his most active year on Twitter.
2020 was dominated by the US election
campaign. Most of Trump’s tweets dealt with
domestic issues which are not displayed in
our maps. China still led his international
Political Insight March 2021.indd 20Political Insight March 2021.indd 20 15/02/2021 14:2915/02/2021 14:29
To continue reading
Request your trial