How Trump is redefining influencer politics
President Trump considers himself something of an influencer.
“I don't know if you call it influence, I don't know if you call it power, but whatever it is, we’re in the White House,” he said Thursday.
While YouTubers gathered in Anaheim, Calif., last week for VidCon, Trump assembled a pro-Trump VidCon of his own for a White House social media summit.
Though he isn’t the first president to attempt to harness the power of social media, Trump’s relationship with online personalities and platforms is unconventional and more partisan than his predecessor’s.
While former President Obama sat for interviews with YouTube personalities like GloZell and Bethany Mota, Trump was accused by the Southern Poverty Law Center of “essentially conducting a hate summit at the White House.” In 2012, Obama broke a Reddit record with his AMA, or “Ask Me Anything” interview. This summer, the pro-Trump Reddit page where some of the memes that Trump tweets first appear, r/The_Donald, was quarantined after users called for violence.
The guest list for Trump’s summit included the founder of a website known for spreading conspiracy theories, the guy fired from BuzzFeed for plagiarism, and a Twitter user whose tweet questioning Sen. Kamala Harris’ race was accused of birtherism. YouTubers Diamond and Silk, the closest thing the pro-Trump internet has to their own Paul brothers, were also in attendance.
“Never before have so many online journalists and influencers — and that is exactly what you are, you are journalists and you are influencers — come together in this building to discuss the future of social media,” Trump said.
Trump talked a bit about his own accounts. He said he doesn’t buy his followers (“I don't want to do that because first of all, if I did it, it's a front-page story all over the place,” he said) and described watching his tweets travel from Twitter to Facebook, Instagram, and television.
“Boom,” he said. “I press it, and within two seconds, ‘We have breaking news.’”
The dopamine feedback loop social media users experience is real, with likes, favs, and retweets rewarding us for posting content. One can only imagine what that’s like for Trump, who can reprogram a cable news show with the push of a button.
Like any good influencer, Trump has a feel for how his content performs based on how fast the likes roll in, and lately, he said, it’s slowed down.
“A good tweet, it goes up,” he said.
Then he started counting — 7,000. 7,008. — describing a retweet count as if reading live off his phone on the Twitter app. 7,017, he continued. 7,024.
“Now it goes 7,000, 7,008, 6,998,” he said.
Who among us hasn’t been disappointed by a clever tweet that didn’t get the traction we thought it deserved? Or posted a well-lit selfie that bombed?
Complaints about sagging like counts are common on social media, but the most influencers can usually do about it is ask their followers to turn on post notification. Trump can hold a press conference and accuse tech companies of political bias.
Such claims have been debunked and presented without evidence on the right. In fact, recent data from NewsWhip showed most of the top stories about Democratic candidates online are from conservative sites.
Still, Trump wondered why his engagement is down, particularly because he said he is, “hotter now than I was then, okay?”
Trump certainly has been producing compelling content. His photo with Kim Jong Un at the North Korea border was a first for a president and got more than 1.2 million likes on Instagram, and his “Salute to America” event doubled as a photoshoot at the Lincoln Monument. It was a second chance to get Trump a National Mall crowd shot, after his first one was cropped to hide the empty spots. Like the political equivalent of a badly facetuned mirror selfie with warped dressers giving away their secrets, his edited inaugural photos were mocked.
Maybe Trump’s content has just gotten stale. A May Politico-Morning Consult poll found about 70% of respondents believe Trump tweets too much. I used to have Trump tweet notifications turned on my phone, but switched them off several months ago while trying to reign in my notifications. I just don’t read them as frequently as I used to.
That’s not to say Trump’s tweets still don’t make the news, but it takes something truly shocking, like telling sitting members of Congress to “go back” to their countries, to galvanize widespread attention.
While Obama worked with creators to promote things like Obamacare enrollment through BuzzFeed and “Between Two Ferns” videos, Trump is turning to creators to make content to “own the libs.” If his tweets don’t get the traction they once did, perhaps a troll army of memesmiths could help him out.
For more coverage of the culture, branding, and visual rhetoric of politics in America, subscribe to Yello’s newsletter: