The Tweetocracy

Donald Trump’s use of Twitter has been his foremost tool to communicate directly with his base and manipulate public debate, which makes his recent ban from the platform a significant event. In this excerpt from Empire of Resentment: Populism’s Toxic Embrace of Nationalism, author Lawrence Rosenthal looks back at how Trump has used the media and Twitter to shape his image, in ways that resemble Italian dictator Benito Mussolini’s media exploitations.

From his official declaration of candidacy in June 2015 through the first two-and-a-half years of his presidency, [Trump] tweeted over 17,000 times. Since early in his presidency, his tweets have been considered official statements by the president of the United States.(40)

As president, Donald Trump was in continuous campaign mode. He thrived on rallies where he gave clear voice (“Knock the crap out of him”) to undermining the foundations of American democracy.(41) As though the 2016 election was not quite resolved in his mind, he never tired of attacking both Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton in press conferences, be those conferences in formal settings, with foreign leaders in the White House, or beside the roaring blades of his helicopter. (42)

Of all Trump’s engines to manipulate the contents of what was in the public debate and on the public’s minds, his use of Twitter was his foremost tool. Trump’s tweeting must be understood in context: Monitoring the media on television was the outstanding daily preoccupation of his White House routine, at times taking up to eight hours of his day; his tweets more often than not were his speaking out — or acting out — after a provocation encountered in the media.

[Trump] seems driven by . . . watching the watchers. In a 24-hour-news version of burying oneself in press clippings, Trump spends hours a day parsing political coverage about him and reacting in an endless and agitated feedback loop. . . . His tweets and public comments suggest he spends hours a day watching shows, even on the networks he dubs “fake news” (mainly, CNN). (43)

Fox News had a special place in Trump’s TV routine. He would bring people into his administration, including in senior positions, who had been talking heads he admired on Fox News. (44) He would make impromptu appearances on his favorite show, Fox and Friends, in the morning. (46) His favorite commentator, Sean Hannity, “basically ha[d] a desk at [the] White House.” On the rare occasion he did not like what was on Fox he would accuse them of betrayal. (47) When Fox acted as a hinge raising up false and conspiratorial stories from the online world of right populist media, Trump was ready to bite. (48) More than any other source, Trump’s tweeting was heavily influenced by what was on Fox News; often his tweets followed directly from what had just been broadcast.

Many of the president’s most vicious tweets, which often baffle observers because they seem to come out of nowhere, make more sense when you realize that they are actually his responses to Fox’s programming. (49)

Twitter gave Trump — both as candidate and as president — an unmediated avenue to the public — both pro and con. In a somewhat improbable way, as head of state, Twitter also gave Trump his most profound resemblance to Benito Mussolini as head of state. Like Trump on Twitter, Mussolini had his own unmediated connection to the public, his newspaper, called (in the most populist manner) Il Popolo d’Italia (The People of Italy), which he founded upon his break from the Socialist Party in 1914. Except for a few brief tenures as a teacher in his early twenties, journalism had been the consistent occupation of his adult life. Always, he was a journalist in the sense of editorialist — or propagandist — rather than reporter. And always, his opinions were bellicose and provocative. Mussolini continued to publish Il Popolo d’Italia until his ouster from power in 1943. Here is the British historian F.W. Deakin’s description of Mussolini as head of state. Note the rather astonishing overlap between the place of parsing the news in Mussolini’s and Trump’s everyday routines:

The reading of the Italian and foreign press occupied a central position in [Mussolini’s] activity, and the daily directives to the Ministry of Popular Culture were the essence and revelation of the personal direction of the Duce. A study of these directives would give a detailed picture at any given moment of the shifts and trends of Italian policy. A change in headlines or pagination in the totally-controlled Press would indicate imminent and future developments and recent decisions.

This was Mussolini’s real world, and the measure of his genius lay essentially in the manipulation of the masses by the written and spoken word. . . . In a sense Mussolini governed Italy as if he were running a personal newspaper single-handed, setting the type, writing the leaders, interviewing everybody, chasing the reporters, paying the informers, sacking staff incessantly, defining the policy to be adopted and the causes to be defended. (50)

In this behavior, both Trump and Mussolini violated liberalism’s notions of the relationship between the press and political power. Murray Kempton pointed out the central role Mussolini’s skills as a journalist had in his political career, and the top-heavy representation of journalists among the gerarchi, the fascist leadership — so much so that Kempton called this a fundamental reversal of the rational arrangements of the liberal state:

In democratic societies journalism is often a branch of government; but in Mussolini’s, government was a branch of journalism . . . [a] curious reversal of the normal arrangements of nature and reason. (51)

The difference between Trump’s and Mussolini’s violations of the place of journalism in liberalism is that Fascism institutionalized it. Fascism in Italy created the “corporate state.” Under the corporate state the citizen as a participant in political life was defined not geographically (as in voting in the location one lives in) but in terms of the sector of the economy one worked in, each of which was called a corporation, and the relations among corporations were mediated by the state. In the Fascist state, “giornalista,” or journalist, was enshrined as a corporation. There were three categories of journalists officially recognized in the corporation: One was simply called journalist, defined by working for the press in much the way the liberal world would define journalist. The second was “giornalista praticante,” apprentice journalist. The third? “Pubblicista.” Pubblicista roughly translates as publicist but is best understood as eliding the difference between the publicist and the journalist. The Fascist constitution, as it were, officially recognized publicity as a sub-category of journalism; it muddied the distinctions between journalism and advertising, publicity and public relations. This has been the effect of Trump’s political ascendency on American culture; it is an informal effect, not yet reaching into the country’s legal structure, but at large in the miasma that Trump has introduced into the country’s political culture.

In the 1980s, Trump used a telephone pseudonym, John Barron, to assert fictitious estimates of his net worth. (52) As a politician, hiding behind a fiction like John Barron has been scuttled. Instead Trump’s self-aggrandizement has constantly been out in the open — in his speeches, in his off-the-cuff remarks (calling himself a “stable genius”) and in tweets noting such qualities as his “great and unmatched wisdom.” Unlike illiberal leaders abroad, like Viktor Orbán in Hungary, Trump has not been able to institutionalize a transformation of journalism à la Mussolini in the USA. He has simply been able on an individual basis — but in the country’s most powerful political position — to act like a pubblicista-style journalist. (53) This reflects both the strength of liberal institutions in the USA, and Trump’s limitations as a politician, owing to both personality and his ignorance of history and political philosophy.

Trump’s Tweetocracy has not yet transformed into a robust illiberal democracy, like Hungary, Poland, or Russia. Instead, what he has wrought is rather like a grayed-out version of illiberalism: grayed-out in the way that websites gray-out options that are not yet available. The options are there, but as potentials, upcoming options when prerequisites are all in place; possibilities just over the horizon. The conditions to move an option from grayed-out to live have not yet fully been realized. So it is with Donald Trump’s Tweetocracy: The potentials for institutionalized illiberalism are present as never before in American public life. As yet they remain grayed-out.

(40) “Donald Trump on Social Media,” Wikipedia, en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donald_Trump_on_social_media. Viewed Nov. 29, 2019.

(41) Trump’s calls for violence against opponents, the occasional dissenter in his rally crowds, and the press are legion. An early summary as a candidate may be found in Kate Sommers-Dawes, “All the Times Trump Has Called for Violence at His Rallies,” Mashable, Mar. 11, 2016, mashable.com/2016/03/12/trump-rally-incite-violence. On Trump’s continuation of this behavior as president, see David Leonhardt, “It Isn’t Complicated: Trump Encourages Violence,” New York Times, Mar. 17, 2019. And Jonathan Chait, “Trump Isn’t Inciting Violence by Mistake, but on Purpose. He Just Told Us,” New York Magazine, Nov. 5, 2018, nymag.com/intelligencer/2018/11/trump-isnt-inciting-violence-by-mistake-he-just-told-us.html.

(42) See, for example, John Wagner, “Trump Takes Aim at Obama, Clinton, Judges, Election Officials, Reporters and a Host of Others Before Leaving the Country,” Washington Post, Nov. 9, 2018, www.washingtonpost.com/politics/trump-takes-aim-at-obama-clinton-judges-election-officials-reporters-and-a-host-of-others-before-leaving-the-country/2018/11/09/bd52140a-e435-11e8b759-3d88a5ce9e19story.html.

(43) From Michael Shaw, “Six Rare Images That Capture Trump’s TV Addiction,” Columbia Journalism Review, May 31, 2017, www.cjr.org/politics/trump-tv-addiction.php.
See Elaine Godfrey, “Trump’s TV Obsession Is a First,” The Atlantic,
Apr. 3, 2017, www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2017/04/donald-trump-americas-first-tv-president/521640.
See also Brandon Carter, “Trump Watches up to Eight Hours of TV Per Day: Report,” The Hill, Dec. 9, 2017, thehill.com/homenews/administration/364094-trump-watches-at-least-four-hours-of-tv-per-day-report..

(44) For example, former Fox TV host Lawrence Kudlow was made director of the National Economic Council in March 2018; and John Bolton was named national security advisor the following month — he lasted five months in the position.

(45) A perhaps extreme example: Trump spent fifty-three minutes on the phone with Fox and Friends the morning of November 22, 2019. (See Axios, www.axios.com/trump-fox-and-friends-call-impeachment-ukraine-e1739c65-33d3-4c35-a723-7a31abb488ef.html.)

(46) See Jessica Kwong, “Fox News’s Sean Hannity Basically Has a Desk at White House as President’s Most Influential Counselor: Trump Advisor,” Newsweek, Sep. 5, 2019, www.newsweek.com/sean-hannity-white-house-desk-counselor-donald-trump-1457917.

(47) For example, see Chris Cillizza, “Why Donald Trump Feels Betrayed by Fox News,” CNN, May 21, 2019, www.cnn.com/2019/05/20/politics/fnc-fox-news-donald-trump/index.html.

(48) One (quite painful) example of Trump buying into the conspiracy fevers on the right was the case of the death of Seth Rich.

Fox News played an instrumental role in helping push the conspiracy theory that the 27-year-old Rich, who was murdered in a botched robbery in July 2016, had contact with WikiLeaks, which released thousands of Hillary Clinton campaign emails during the 2016 presidential race.

Ari Berman, “Seth Rich’s Family Just Won a Legal Victory Against Fox
News, Mother Jones, Sep. 14, 2019, www.motherjones.com/politics/2019/09/seth-richs-family-just-won-a-legal-victory-against-fox-news. See also Ed Pilkington, “The Strange Case of Fox News, Trump and the Death of Young Democrat Seth Rich,” The Guardian, Aug. 7, 2017, www.theguardian.com/media/2017/aug/07/seth-rich-trump-white-house-fox-news.

In “Exclusive: The True Origins of the Seth Rich Conspiracy Theory,” Michael Isikoff traces the chain of Rich conspiracy thinking through the populist right media and its path to Fox News and to Donald Trump. An excerpt illustrating that passage:

Along the way, the idea that Rich was murdered in retaliation for leaking DNC emails to WikiLeaks was championed by multiple allies of Trump, including Roger Stone. The same day [WikiLeaks head Julian] Assange falsely hinted that Rich may have been his source for DNC emails, Stone tweeted a picture of Rich, calling the late DNC staffer in a tweet “another dead body in the Clinton’s wake.” He then added: “Coincidence? I think not.”

Yahoo News, Jul. 9, 2019.
(49) From Matthew Gertz, “I’ve Studied the Trump-Fox Feedback Loop
for Months. It’s Crazier Than You Think,” Politico, Jan. 5, 2018, www.politico.com/magazine/story/2018/01/05/trump-media-feedback-loop-216248.

From Daniel Moritz-Rabson, “Video Compilation Shows Thirty Times Trump Repeated ‘Fox and Friends’ Talking Points in 2018,” Newsweek, Dec. 28, 2018:

A video compiled by news monitor Media Matters shows 30 times President Donald Trump repeated talking points from Fox & Friends in 2018, illuminating the close connection between the president and the morning show, www.newsweek.com/trump-fox-and-friends-influence-video-twitter-tweets-fox-news-1274231.

(50) F.W. Deakin, The Brutal Friendship: Mussolini, Hitler and the Fall of Italian Fascism, vol. 1 (Doubleday, 1966), 41–42.

(51) Murray Kempton, “A Genius of Journalism,” New York Review of Books, Oct. 7, 1982. Kempton notes that half of Fascism’s Grand Council in 1930 consisted of journalists.

(52) See Jessica Estepa, “Reporter Says Donald Trump Used Alter Ego ‘John Barron’ to Get onto Forbes 400 List,” USA Today, Apr. 20, 2018, www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/onpolitics/2018/04/20/reporter-recalls-trumps-alter-ego-amazed-didnt-see-through-ruse/537312002.

As John Cassidy pointed out:
These days, when Trump has a self-serving whopper to spread around, he goes on Twitter and attaches his own name to it. In the age of @realDonaldTrump, there is no longer any need for John Barron.

“Trump’s History of Lying, from John Barron to @realDonaldTrump,” New Yorker, Apr. 23, 2018, www.newyorker.com/news/our-columnists /trumps-history-of-lying-from-john-barron-to-realdonaldtrump.

(53) In this Trump most resembles his British counterpart Boris Johnson.

“Boris Johnson is more of a journalist than he is a statesman by a considerable margin,” said David Yelland, a former editor of The Sun, a tabloid. “His instincts are those of a newspaper columnist, and his consistency is that of a British newspaper columnist, in the sense that he says one thing on a Monday and another on a Tuesday and it doesn’t matter.”

Benjamin Mueller, “For Pro-Brexit Press, Boris Johnson Is Already a Winner,” New York Times, Oct. 21, 2019, www.nytimes.com/2019/10/21/world/europe/brexit-newspapers-boris-Johnson.html.

Dr. Lawrence Rosenthal is chair and lead researcher of the Berkeley Center for Right-Wing Studies.

This excerpt originally appeared in his book Empire of Resentment: Populism’s Toxic Embrace of Nationalism. Copyright ©2020 by Lawrence Rosenthal