Has Twitter’s biggest troll lost his edge?
Since Donald Trump first joined Twitter in May 2009, the real-estate developer turned basic-cable reality star has used the social-media platform to offer 140-character thoughts on everything from Kristen Stewart and Robert Pattinson’s relationship to his feelings about sharks. Trump’s public musings became more political, though less refined, after he declared his candidacy for president. All through 2015 and 2016, Trump used Twitter to pillory his enemies and make inflammatory, often outright false statements, each of which reverberated through the media, shocking the establishment and electrifying his followers. It was, in a way, almost punk rock.
Recently, however, there’s been a growing sense that Trump is losing his edge. After he won the election, Trump continued to deploy his Twitter account to devastating effect, throwing the stocks of multiple public companies into turmoil, threatening to cancel government contracts, causing diplomatic crises by criticizing other countries, and even attacking a union leader in Indiana who disagreed with him. But over the past several weeks, each of Trump’s tweets has landed with less and less impact. Multiple news organizations noted how none of Trump’s tweets appeared to have any long-term impact. If anything, companies appeared to become more valuable after Trump ripped into them on Twitter. While the president’s tweets still land him in hot water—would the Russia scandal be nearly as bad if Trump hadn’t decided, apparently on a whim, to accuse the previous administration of “wiretapping” him?—the media collectively yawned when he tweeted last week about changing libel laws.
It’s the “‘boy who cried wolf’ effect,” suggests Mike Allen. “People kind of get that’s he's messing with them,” one former Trump aide told Axios. Even Republican lawmakers who used to be cowed by Trump’s social-media bully pulpit are now fighting back on Twitter, throwing the president’s threats back in his face when he targets them online.
Experts, too, acknowledge that Trump’s online influence is waning.
“It’s just not new anymore,” Jay Baer, a political scientist turned social-media consultant for Fortune 500 companies, told me. “It was so revolutionary from the very beginning that a candidate, and then obviously an office holder, would be so direct and so unafraid to be abrasive. The newness was part of the momentum, and obviously the newness has worn off, and we all move on to other things very quickly.”
The public and the media are also both growing weary of Trump’s tweets, Baer added.
“It feels like there’s a little bit of an eyeroll about the whole thing—’great, we get it, it’s a shtick, but how about doing president stuff?’ ” A January poll released by Quinnipiac University found that 64 percent of voters wanted Trump to ditch his personal Twitter account while he’s in office.
Media coverage of Trump’s individual tweets seems to have lessened too. “But I think the real story here is the media seemingly collectively deciding ‘we’re just going to report on it less,’ ” Baer said. “Because the success of those tweets, historically, has been largely propelled by second- and third-level reporting on them. So obviously he has a large Twitter following, but hell, Katy Perry has a much larger Twitter following, right? And so it’s not so much how many people he reaches with his own tweets. My assumption is that you’ve seen less traditional press coverage of tweets as news over the last 30 or 60 days—that’s one of the reasons why the air has come out of his balloon.”
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Originally Posted by Zippyjuan
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