Twitter and TV

Of course, it’s not as if Trump doesn’t know about the power and violence of language. He does. Stage presence plays an important role in his use of language as well as in his dancing. He didn’t learn how to perform from just anyone; as Trump recalled, “Sinatra once told me, ‘Never eat before a performance’.”¹⁰ Trump initially used television as his stage, then Twitter and other social media from 2009 onwards.

The fact that Trump was elected the 45th US President in November 2016, contrary to his own expectations and those of his campaign team,¹¹ was also, perhaps primarily, due to his virtuosic use of Twitter. Twitter enabled Trump to bypass all the gatekeepers of the established print and television media. How Trump has played and continues to play into the hands of the algorithmic logic of the attention economy¹² of social media has been described in detail.¹³ On social media, emotionally arousing content—especially negative emotions—is self-reinforcing, meaning that it spreads many times (around six times) faster than factual reports, for example.¹⁴ John Bolton has spoken of Trump’s “Twitter presidency”; ac⁠cording to Bob Woodward,¹⁵ Trump has described himself as “the Ernest Hemingway of 140 characters”.¹⁶

Trump immediately recognized the opportunity that social media offered him when an aide showed and explained Twitter to him in May 2009. Trump pounded the table, shouted “let’s do it[!]” and started tweeting (as @realDonaldTrump, since @DonaldTrump was already taken).¹⁷ When Twitter blocked @realDonaldTrump, despite the reservations of co-founder and CEO Jack Dorsey, after the storming of the Capitol on January 6, 2021, @realDonaldTrump had 88.7 million followers.¹⁸ In November 2022, Elon Musk, the new Twitter owner, lifted Trump’s ban on the platform Musk had renamed to X. On November 5, 2024, Trump was elected President of the United States for a second time.

If Twitter made Trump the US president, then television made Trump the man who became president. Trump—“He’s an extraordinary showman” (Wolff)¹⁹—sees himself as a TV entertainer and producer. When there was a scandal with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky in the White House on February 28, 2025, Trump’s last words in front of the cameras were: “[Y]ou’re either going to make a deal or we’re out. And if we’re out, you’ll fight it out. [...] All right. I think we’ve seen enough. What do you think, huh? This is going to be great television. I will say that. All right. [...] Thank you.”²⁰ The so-called deal desired by Trump does not materialize, and he openly threatens Ukraine with the end of US military support—but he has delivered “great television” either way.

Trump also relied on the power of persuasion and the overwhelming effect of television when he accused South African President Cyril Ramaphosa of genocide against the white population of South Africa on May 21, 2025. Trump had screens brought into the Oval Office specifically for this purpose (“They’ve brought screens, there’s not usually TV in the Oval Office, and they were prepared to do this”, CNN, May 21, 2025²¹). As Trump asked, “Is Natalie [Harp²²] here? Is somebody’s here to turn that? [...] Turn the lights down and just put this on”, the screening of a TV “documentary” (Trump: “we have documentaries”) to substantiate the genocide allegations began in a kind of eerie home theater atmosphere.²³ Like a script that he no longer needs, Trump finally hands the South African president a stack of papers.

Ramin Setoodeh described the extent to which Trump’s career, thoughts and actions have been shaped by television in his 2024 book Apprentice in Wonderland: How Donald Trump and Mark Burnett Took America Through the Looking Glass. It begins with the first episode of “The Apprentice”, which was recorded in Trump Tower and broadcast in 2004. When Trump, as he claims, improvised the “catchphrase” “You’re fired!”, the entire Trump Tower began to shake so violently that filming had to be stopped: “‘When I said, ‘You’re fired!’ the whole building shook,” Trump says of that first episode. “[...] The place just reverberated. People were screaming. They were shouting [...] and they went crazy.” “In fact,” he says, “they had to stop the tape [...], because you can’t have that.”²⁴

Notes

1. ¹⁰Wolff, All Or Nothing, p. 266.
2. ¹¹“Almost everybody in the campaign [...] thought [...] not only would Donald Trump not be president, he probably should not be. [...] ‘I can be the most famous man in the world,’ Trump told his [...] aide Sam Nunberg [...]. ‘But do you want to be president? [...]’ Nunberg did not get an answer.”—“[W]hen the unexpected trend—Trump might actually win—seemed confirmed, Don Jr. told a friend that his father, DJT, as he called him, looked as if he had seen a ghost. Melania [...] was in tears”; Wolff, Fire and Fury, p. 10f. and 18.
3. ¹²“Good attention, bad attention—it didn’t make any difference; he’d broken the attention paradigm. All attention was equal and positive”; Wolff, All or Nothing, p. 31.
4. ¹³See, for example Yini Zhang, Chris Wells, Son Wang and Karl Rohe: Attention and amplification in the hybrid media system: The composition and activity of Donald Trump’s Twitter following during the 2016 presidential election, in: new media & society 2018, Vol. 20 (9), pp. 3161-3182; as narrative: Andreas Barthelmess: Die große Zerstörung. Was der digitale Bruch mit unserem Leben macht, Berlin 2020, p. 128-155 (see the chapter “Polarisierung, Social Media und Welt ohne Gatekeeper”). See also Katja Müller-Helle: Tonald Drump, Zensur und Deplatforming, in: Merkur 866 (July 2021), pp. 69-76, and Albrecht Koschorke: Twitter, Trump und die (Ent)Demokratisierung der Demokratie, in: Merkur 856 (September 2020), pp. 5-15.
5. ¹⁴Soroush Vosoughi, Deb Roy, Sinan Aral: The spread of true and false news online. In: Science 359 (2018), H. 6380, pp. 1146-1151; www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.aap9559 (6/6/2025).
6. ¹⁵John Bolton: The Room Where It Happened. A White House Memoir, New York et al. 2020, p. 443.
7. ¹⁶Bob Woodward: Fear. Trump in the White House, London et al. 2018, p. 207.
8. ¹⁷Maggie Haberman: Confidence Man. The Making of Donald Trump and the Breaking of America, New York 2022, p. 171f.
9. ¹⁸www.dw.com/en/donald-trump-loses-social-media-megaphone/a-56158414 (6/6/2025).
10. ¹⁹Apple podcast “The Rest Is Politics” with Rory Stewart and Alistair Campbell, episode 124 (10/3/2025): “The Man Who Got To Trump (Michael Wolff)” (6/6/2025).
11. ²⁰“Excerpts From the Fiery Exchange Between Trump and Zelensky at the White House,” www.nytimes.com/2025/02/28/us/politics/trump-zelensky-transcript.html (6/6/2025).
12. ²¹https://transcripts.cnn.com/show/ip/date/2025-05-21/segment/02 (6/6/2025); the following Trump quote ibid.
13. ²²On the role of Natalie Harp Wolff, All or Nothing, pp. 32f., 58-50 and 101f. “She has risen to [...] be the most important person around him”, according to Wolff in “The Rest Is Politics”.
14. ²³ https://rollcall.com/factbase/trump/transcript/donald-trump-remarks-bilat-cyril-ramaphosa-south-africa-oval-office-may-21-2025/ (6/6/2025).
15. ²⁴Ramin Setoodeh: Apprentice in Wonderland: How Donald Trump and Mark Burnett Took America Through the Looking Glass, New York 2024, 2f.