Trump’s most lethal weapon lethal weapon

Badly spelt, full of fibs and often sent in the dead of night, The Donald’s tweets are much mocked. But, from global events to flogging his own-brand mattress, his posts are far more powerful than you think . . .

BEFORE Donald Trump, politics was the domain of experts. They knew everything there was to know about focus groups, opinion polls and voter targeting — and they set all the rules. No longer. Trump has humiliated and destroyed these experts — by deploying a lethal weapon called Twitter.

It didn’t seem like much of a threat to begin with: just 140 characters to unload what was on his mind, often in the early hours.

Yet his tweet-fest brought politics back to life, and played a huge part in getting him elected. Trump exploited Twitter’s ability to express raw sentiment instantly, without nuance or subtext, and to remove any boundary between assertion and fact.

And because they’ve changed America and thus affected the entire world, his tweets are a serious matter. ‘I think that maybe I wouldn’t be [President] if it wasn’t for Twitter,’ he has said, with some justification.

Trump joined Twitter in 2009, three years after it launched, to promote his books and generate publicity for his TV show, the U.S. original of The Apprentice.

At that point, he used it to flaunt his brash personality, his wealth and achievements, while basking in the celebrity of those he met, including Bill and Hillary Clinton. He was even generous about President obama.

To begin with he had just 216 followers, and the numbers increased slowly. With good reason: his early tweets — apparently supervised by Prs — were crushingly dull.

The tone changed in the summer of 2011, when Trump began toying with the idea of running for President.

He started writing his own tweets on his Samsung mobile, making extravagant use of exclamation marks, capital letters and staccato insults that have defined his Twitter discourse ever since.

Here at last was The Donald’s unique voice. He made enemies, pursued feuds and communicated a sense of apocalyptic doom.

He could also be funny, and was often acute. ‘Wake up America... China is eating our lunch,’ he wrote in August 2011.

Twitter was well-suited to a campaign based largely on rage. And if the facts later exposed what he was saying to be untrue, he didn’t care. According to the rules of conventional politics, this should have been the end of Donald Trump. But instead he became President.

So why did he win? He won because he bypassed hostile conventional media, secured the acceptance of his often wild assertions as fact, and aligned himself with the ‘forgotten’ masses against a powerful elite.

Plenty of other U.S. politicians have used these tactics. In the fifties, Senator Joseph McCarthy became America’s most powerful politician by exploiting the anti-Communist hysteria of the time. He caused an instant sensation by declaring he had a list of 205 Communists in the U.S. State Department. This was almost certainly a total invention, and he never produced the list.

President Nixon, beset by political enemies in 1969, successfully used another tactic adopted by Trump. In a televised speech, he invoked ‘the silent majority’.

That phrase changed everything (and his popularity ratings) — instantly giving a home to everyone who didn’t want to protest against the Vietnam War or the police, and who didn’t reject authority, religion and family life.

Small wonder, then, that Trump tweeted in 2015: ‘I truly LOVE all of the millions of people who are sticking with me despite so many media lies. There is a great SILENT MAJORITY looming.’

The phrase was used repeatedly throughout his campaign.

TRUMP is truly a model politician of the postmodern age where there’s no such thing as an independent reality and all ‘truths’ are really competing narratives. (or where, as his campaign manager Kellyanne Conway famously put it, there are ‘alternative facts’.)

It also helped that he was a seasoned television star, instinctively understanding that politics was entertainment — hence all the name-calling, the bullying and the personal attacks on opponents and critics.

As a result, Trump has reached far beyond the normal audience for politics, speaking directly to tens of millions of Americans when he tweeted about the disenfranchisement of the working class.

And Twitter has shown itself to be the perfect medium for appealing to the ‘silent majority’. It’s completely democratic, free and open to all, with few restrictions and little filtering.

Through tweets, a politician can appeal at a personal level to anyone who’s against anything — and make him or her feel like part of a vast shared community.

They can give the ‘silent majority’ a voice — sometimes quite literally. (A high proportion of Trump’s Twitter output during the election campaign was made up of re-tweets from the accounts of ordinary

people. He didn’t bother vetting them, even though some were run by white supremacists.)

No one can predict what Trump will tweet next. One day he’ll be spraying insults around; the next he’ll be advising mega-rich celebrities to get prenuptial contracts, or ranting that America should have taken all of Iraq’s oil.

He also majors in alarm and despondency. In fact, one of the reasons his tweets are so powerful is that they repeatedly fan people’s fears that the U.S. is under mortal threat from multiple enemies. Without the leadership of Trump, his tweets suggest, the country faces not only financial collapse but an existential challenge from Muslims who want to take over the globe.

In both his tweets and his presidency, Donald Trump continues to embody limitless contradictions that he makes no attempt to explain.

Here is a billionaire who speaks for America’s dispossessed; a Christian without compassion; a budget hawk who wants to tax less and spend more. In due course, he may well collapse under the weight of his own contradictions.

In the meantime, with more than 28million Twitter followers and 35,000 tweets to date and counting, he still has America’s ‘forgotten men and women’ very much on his side.

Here we present a selection of The Donald’s wit, whimsy, vanity and self-promotion, with a smattering of bigotry, bile, utter nonsense — and occasional good sense — all according to Twitter.

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