From today’s Protocol newsletter: President Trump’s (otherwise relatively boring) interview last week with Barstool Sports CEO Dave Portnoy brought a somewhat unprecedented look into how @realdonaldtrump thinks about Twitter. Here are a few excerpts: On what happens to the account when he leaves office: “Well it’s mine, and I don’t know that I’ll ever use it again, but […]
Tag: donald trump
This extract from Tim Wu’s The Attention Merchants pg 343 captures something important about the sociology of Donald Trump’s presidency. I think he’s correct about the use of constant strife, echoing the argument by Will Davies about the blurring boundary between war and peace, to dominate the media agenda in a way which ensures the […]
From The Hybrid Media system pg 254-255. It’s not about followers, as much as the capacity to leverage a following into online events which invite media coverage which would otherwise be restricted to those with greater political capital. He notes how this is compounded by the tendency for journalists to use social media influence as […]
How significant can a tweet can be? We can point to isolated cases of individual tweets going viral, creating controversy and producing material outcomes in the world. But isolated tweets rarely have such significance. Instead, we need to look at a Twitter feed as a unit of analysis, taking someone’s entire output on the platform as […]
In an old essay about Heidegger’s conception of language, the philosopher Charles Taylor invokes the notion of ‘words of power’ to explain the power of Hitler’s rhetoric. Once we move away from a sense of language as an expression of individual meanings and purposes, we find ourselves somewhere entirely differently: The silence is where there […]
There’s an interesting extract in this Guardian article about the growing civil war in the Republican party, concerning the adoption of Trump’s tactics by aspirant politicians within the party: Trump’s refusal to support McCain and Ryan comes exactly one week before Ryan faces a primary challenge from the businessman Paul Nehlen, a candidate who has […]
This was Donald Trump’s stance only a couple of decades ago. From pg 222 of Never Enough: Donald Trump and the Pursuit of Success: Trump attempted a more serious pose, traveling to Capitol Hill to tell a congressional committee that he thought they should raise taxes on the rich. Reagan tax cuts that had reduced […]
From Confidence Men, by Ron Susskind, pg 23-24: But it was hard to know how even Lincoln’s rhetorical genius would have met the awesome challenge of modern politics: to explain hugely complex problems and offer first-step solutions in all of sixty seconds. Hillary Clinton could do it just like Lincoln split wood: steady and true, […]
Until relatively recently, I’d assumed that Donald Trump’s political ambitions amounted to little more than self-promotion, not unlike Sarah Palin’s post-2008 career trajectory. Sean Illing suggests this is still the case and that Trump’s recent pronouncements can be seen as increasingly desperate attempts to disqualify himself while creating a media storm: Like almost everyone else in […]
