The count was ready, it was clear that Donald Trump had lost – and he tweeted: “either a new election must take place or … results annulled”.
It looks familiar, but it wasn’t November 2020. It was February 2016.
Trump had only been in his presidential campaign for a few months and was already telling a story that he would tell countless times over the next five years, suggesting to the world the character of the man that the United States Senate will soon assess at the impeachment trial.
At that time, Trump was trying to undo Ted Cruz’s victory. And he was accusing Iowa of messing up the vote count in the primaries.
“The state of Iowa should disqualify Ted Cruz from the most recent elections based on the fact that he cheated – a total fraud!” Trump tweeted.
The Donald Trump that Americans now think was the same Donald Trump who entered the election in 2015 and the White House in 2016. Part of his power to gather a loyal base was based on his repetitive rhetorical style, but on Twitter he was especially powerful as chief narrator of his own political life.
In 2017, I started collecting all your tweets, since June 16, 2015, the day you announced your candidacy. I continued until January 8, 2021, the day that Twitter permanently suspended his account. I wanted to learn more about how he used the language. But in those 20,301 tweets, I learned something more fundamental about how the 45th President of the United States used Twitter to tell his own story.
Storytelling President
Trump was more effusively positive and more bitingly negative than the politicians, journalists, news organizations and activists I compared him to – including Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton, Katy Tur of NBC, pro-Trump activist Linda Suhler and activist Black Lives Matter DeRay Mckesson.
However, the main difference I found was that Trump was among the most frequent users of narrative methods. As I am a researcher of digital narratives, this intrigued me.
The narrative in general is common among effective politicians, but Trump’s effort appears to have built up a high level of loyalty, diverted attention from negative topics and generally set the agenda for what the American public was discussing.
Others have examined this aspect of Trump’s appeal, examining specific stories throughout his presidency, his storytelling style and even the rhetorical components of his populist narrative.
But I discovered a particular story structure that he used all the time.
Consistency in the midst of change
There were five main themes, which appeared regularly – often in one day:
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The true version of the United States is surrounded by invaders;
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True Americans can see this;
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I (Trump) am the only one qualified to prevent this invasion;
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The establishment and its agents are preventing me;
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The United States is in mortal danger because of this.
Together over time, this formed a general structure of the story that I summarized in this way: “The system is preventing me from protecting it from invaders”.
The elements were flexible. “The system” can be anyone – Democrats, the NFL, a media outlet, a corporation and even Vice President Mike Pence. “The invaders” were China, the coronavirus that first appeared there, people who crossed the US-Mexico border or Black Lives Matter protesters.
But the structure never changed: there was a danger for the nation, Trump was the only one capable of protecting America and was rightly supported by “real” Americans.
This is what he said; how it worked was equally important.
Telling a different story
In the terms that narrative scholars use, Trump has “rewritten” the world to fit his themes. He took elements from news articles, viral videos, other tweets and everything else he needed to build his messages. He took stories that were already in the public sphere and gave them a new meaning to fit his own story.
During the 2015 Republican primary elections, for example, the conservative Club for Growth spent $ 1 million showing negative ads against Trump. But Trump, tweeting, rewrote the story: “The fake Club For Growth, which asked me in writing for $ 1,000,000 (I said no), now wants to make negative announcements about me. Total hypocrites! ”The Club for Growth was a humiliating and fraudulent establishment; he was effective and powerful.
Trump would also rewrite characters in multiple, sometimes contradictory messages, depending on the news of the day. Consider your tweeting about China, which was first a partner, then a commercial opponent, and finally an invader:
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2017: “The failing @nytimes hates the fact that I have developed a great relationship with world leaders like Xi Jinping, president of China… ..”
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2018: “We are not in a trade war with China, this war was lost many years ago by the fools or incompetents who represented the USA. We now have a trade deficit of $ 500 billion a year, with intellectual property theft of another $ 300 billion. We can’t let this continue! “
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2020: “New virus cases in China have increased (due to massive testing), deaths have decreased, ‘low and stable’. Fake News Media should report this and also, that new job numbers are setting records! “
Following the script
Trump tweeted more commonly about the government, the media and corporate institutions, which often became food for news coverage. The media often framed tweets as attacks and “counterattacks”. But, on closer reading, they were not merely responses to criticism or bad news. They described something regularly, as a narrator would.
But his reshaping of reality through his own lenses may also have played a role in Trump’s downfall. All the attacks, all the distortion of information, all the fear, may have exhausted just enough people in key states to guarantee defeat.
When that defeat happened, Trump’s narrative structure did not change: it escalated and multiplied, consuming everything and everyone who did not openly support what many called the Big Lie – that the election was set against him:
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January 3, 2021: “I spoke with Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger yesterday about Fulton County and election fraud in Georgia. He did not want or could not answer questions such as the ‘ballot-under-table’ coup, destruction of ballots, out-of-state ‘voters’, dead voters and much more. He has no idea! “
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January 6, 2021: “Mike Pence did not have the courage to do what should have been done to protect our country and our constitution, giving states the chance to certify a corrected set of facts, not the fraudulent or inaccurate ones they were requested to certify in advance. The USA demands the truth! “
A path to the end
There is not a single line in a Trump speech or tweet that will be the smoking weapon that incites his followers to violence.
But he helped to set the stage for the attack on the Capitol. The most famous was on December 19, 2020: “Peter Navarro releases a 36-page report alleging electoral fraud ‘more than enough’ to guarantee Trump’s victory … A great report by Peter. Statistically impossible to have lost the 2020 elections. Big protest in DC on 6 January. Be there, it will be wild! “
The way Trump wrote this tweet is representative of how he rewrote things to tell his own story. He took something that was already under discussion, the Navarro report, and used it in a way that shaped the logic of the “stop the theft” campaign.
Trump didn’t have to invent #StopTheSteal – just include it in his existing narrative structure. Other politicians, including Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, adopted Trump’s general framework for their own tweets.
However, the final tweet on your account before it closes does not fit into any of your common themes. It is also one of the few times that it seems that the tweet is telling a more traditional story. “To all those who asked, I will not be inaugurated on January 20th” is a very discreet ending to an epic tale.
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This article was republished from The Conversation, a non-profit news site dedicated to sharing ideas from academic experts. It was written by: Michael Humphrey, Colorado State University.
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Michael Humphrey does not work, consult, hold shares or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article and did not disclose relevant affiliations other than his academic appointment.