Lots of Rich Men Tweet Like the President Now

This week’s tweets are meant to influence voters, and Mr. Trump has modeled a singular method of influence in that regard. Rebecca Katz, who has worked as a communications adviser to Mayor Bill de Blasio and Cynthia Nixon, attributed this week’s tweets to the increasingly blurry lines between politics, business, media and celebrity.

“While few business leaders would probably admit it, Trump’s rise has made them think that they can do what he’s done,” Ms. Katz said. “Trump’s shown them that the way to make news and command attention isn’t by being respected. It’s by being outrageous.”

Jack Grieve, a fellow at the University of Birmingham and one of the authors of a paper about linguistic variation on Mr. Trump’s Twitter account, said in an interview that the style of the president’s posts was not arbitrary.

“The stylistic variation you see on Trump’s twitter account is far from some random dumpster fire,” he said. “It’s very systematic.”

For instance, he said, Mr. Trump’s Twitter language became notably more formal once he became the Republican nominee for president in 2016. But it then reverted to informality after the release of the “Access Hollywood” tape. Since the president was inaugurated, Mr. Grieve said, the informality of his language had crept up again. (Mr. Grieve’s analysis spanned from 2009 to early 2018 and did not include the impeachment process.)

That informality was characterized by short sentences, an abundance of pronouns, contractions, questions and direct interactions with other users on the site, Mr. Grieve said.

“The fact that people are imitating him is further evidence that it’s not just random,” Mr. Grieve said. “It’s been appreciated by people who aren’t just political pundits or who aren’t just journalists but who are really in there trying to do this. They’ve appreciated that there’s an art to what he’s doing.”

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/14/style/billionaire-tweet-ecosystem.html?emc=rss&partner=rss