The Ten to Fifteen Things I Find Most Infuriating About Donald Trump's Social Media Strategy

Donald Trump’s defining characteristic as a social media poster might just be volume. Twitter and Truth Social might be primarily text-based medium but that does not keep Trump from screaming at his followers as loudly, passionately, randomly and nonsensically as possible. 

CAPS LOCK convey intensity. They convey passion. But more than anything they’re used, overwhelmingly like the President of the United States, to illustrate that something is so important, shocking and astonishing that lower case isn’t sufficiently. In order for Trump to REALLY drive home his belief that the 2020 presidential election was stolen, Joe Biden is a lethargic incompetent and the Fake News media, the radical left Communists in the Democratic Party and activist judges are illegally and unethically thwarting the will of the American people with their inexplicable contention that it’s somehow illegal to snatch brown people off the street in unmarked vans and send them to rot in overseas prisons he must use capital letters. ALL CAPITAL LETTERS. 

Using all capital letters is social media shorthand for shouting something so loudly that your voice becomes hoarse. That somehow isn’t enough for Trump, so he will sometimes follow CAPS LOCK rants with exquisitely redundant exclamation points. 

Caps lock is used by cranks of a certain age to holler obnoxiously through grammar. Exclamation points are ALSO used by cranks of a certain age to holler obnoxiously through grammar. 

When used together, the result is like primal screen therapy, if the controversial practice was used primarily to complain about Taylor Swift being mean because she endorsed his opponent. 

Trump’s social media strategy is very loud but it’s also very random. To cite a recent example, he was complaining something or other and referred to either the Democrats or the press, or the Democrat-controlled press were SleazeBags. 

I am the seventeenth draft of The Fractured Mirror, my mammoth upcoming book about the history of American movies about filmmaking. At least one of those drafts involved extensively Googling to determine what is capitalized and what is not. 

I can tell you now that unless Trump was referring to a band or a movie explicitly named SleazeBag, that word isn’t capitalized once, let alone twice. 

It could be argued persuasively that Trump is being obnoxious and assaultive on purpose. When it comes to social media communication, Trump is the great Disrupter. He’s a grammatical anarchist and nihilist. Trump 

throws readers off by using words and punctuation in ways that don’t make sense and aren’t appropriate but do a fine job of expressing the endless incoherent rage of someone who has literally been given more than just about anyone in American history yet nurses an unshakeable conviction that he’s been treated worse and more unfairly than any other president, including the ones whose presidencies were cut short when they were assassinated. 

Trump loves punctuation. He just doesn’t know how to use it. He’s particularly enamored of quotation marks. In his post about the Highly Overrated Bruce Springsteen, for example, he says that one of the most revered songwriters and poets in American music and pop culture as “dumb as a rock.”

Trump puts dumb as a rock in quotation marks because it’s a colloquialism but also because it’s a phrase he has employed repeatedly, to the point that he probably feels a sense of ownership over it. Jeb Bush, Don Lemon, Glenn Beck, Rick Wilson, Chris Matthews, Jonah Goldberg, Bill Maher, Toure, Rex Tillerson, Kamala Harris, John Kelly, and Joe Biden have all been derided as dumb as a rock. 

For Trump calling someone he doesn’t like “dumb as a rock” is a golden oldie. It’s a hit. It’s something that his cultists love to see. As I’ve written in this blog, “low IQ” and “dumb as a rock” are dumb, low IQ ways to insult someone but Trump’s fans don’t follow him blindly because he’s clever or smart or has a way with words. They like him because he’s mean and says the things they’d like to say but don’t, out of fear of being considered racist and hateful.

They say you can’t teach an old dog new tricks but Trump recently added something weird to his repetoire. He's famous for ending posts MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN! 

It’s his catchphrase and the name of his movement. It's also a lazy, obvious way to conclude posts. Trump is still in love with the phrase, and the idea, but he’s taken to ending Truth Social posts with, “Thank you for your attention to this matter!” 

Why? I have no idea. It’s as if he saw an HR person sign off that way and decided that it was such a badass turn of phrase he’d appropriate it for himself. 

“Thank you for your attention to this matter!” would make more sense coming at the end of a formal email about the end of Casual Fridays at work than in a post about the imaginary problem of billionaire pop stars getting paid to endorse candidates other than Donald Trump.

It’s a milquetoast turn of phrase that Trump puts his own spin on by adding three exclamation points to let us inow that he REALLY appreciates our attention to this matter. 

I hate when Trump writes about himself in third-person, which he fairly often, sometimes with quotation marks, to separate the man ostensibly writing the post from “Trump”, which is an idea and an ideal as much as a flesh and blood human being. 

Then there are the mocking nickname. Trump used to have a genius for coining catchphrases that succinctly captured everything lame about his enemies. He had a gift. He no longer has that gift. His insults are lazy and interchangeable. 

When Trump deemed his 2016 Crooked Hillary it was iconic. Now he calls everybody crooked.

The third defining feature of Trump as a social media poster is aggression. The point of his posts is not to transmit relevant information. Telling the public what you’re doing as president is a pretty important part of the job but it interests Trump only to the extent that he can brag about his accomplishments. 

The whole point of Trump’s seemingly pointless posts is to hurt his enemies. His writing style is pugilistic in nature. It’s all about jabbing and jabbing and jabbing before going in for the knockout punch. 

For Trump, social media is a medium for bragging shamelessly about how powerful and impressive he is and how pathetic and worthless his enemies are. 

That’s not how American presidents have communicated with the public, through a series of wildly ungrammatical rants crammed into run-on sentences. That’s how villainous professional wrestlers communicate with the public. 

Personality-wise, Trump has more in common with his buddy Vince McMahon than Barack Obama. 

MAGA loves to root for the bad guy, in part because they’ve somehow convinced themselves that a cartoonishly evil cretin is actually a potent force for good in the universe. 

Those are ten to fifteen of the things that bug me most about Trump’s social media strategy but if I put a little thought into it, I could probably come up with ten to twenty more.