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How Donald Trump Uses Twitter As a Weapon of Fear
HughPickens.com writes: Alexander Burns and Maggie Haberman write in the NYT that with his enormous online platform of six million followers, Donald Trump has used Twitter to badger and humiliate those who have dared cross him during the presidential race, latching on to their vulnerabilities, mocking their physical characteristics, personality quirks and, sometimes, their professional setbacks. Trump has made statements that have later been exposed as false or deceptive — only after they have ricocheted across the Internet. For example, Cheri Jacobus, a Republican political strategist, did not think she had done anything out of the ordinary: On a cable television show, she criticized Donald J. Trump for skipping a debate in Iowa in late January and described him as a "bad debater." Trump took to Twitter, repeatedly branding Jacobus as a disappointed job seeker who had begged to work for his campaign and had been rejected. "We said no and she went hostile," Trump wrote. "A real dummy!" Trump's campaign manager told the same story on MSNBC's "Morning Joe." For days, Trump's followers replied to his posts with demeaning, often sexually charged insults aimed at Jacobus, including several with altered, vulgar photographs of her face.
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This week, Trump sent out a menacing message on Twitter about the Ricketts family, a wealthy clan of Republican political donors, after it was reported that Marlene Ricketts donated $3 million to a group opposed to Trump's candidacy. "They better be careful," Trump wrote of the family, "they have a lot to hide!" "It's a little surreal when Donald Trump threatens your mom," Marlene Ricketts's son, Tom, later told reporters.
It is not just that Trump has a skill for zeroing in on an individual's soft spot and hammering at it. It is that he sets a tone of aggression against the person, and his supporters echo and amplify it. Jacobus sent a cease-and-desist letter to Trump and his top aide, citing electronic messages that showed the Trump campaign had courted her and not the other way around. "I have been trashed and ruined on Twitter," Jacobus says adding that Trump's lawyers had responded to her letter, but that they had not yet reached a resolution. "At what point does it cross the line into something that's defamatory and might be actionable?" says Parry Aftab, a lawyer who leads the Internet safety group WiredSafety. "At what point does it cross the line into encouraging violence against groups and individuals?"
It is not just that Trump has a skill for zeroing in on an individual's soft spot and hammering at it. It is that he sets a tone of aggression against the person, and his supporters echo and amplify it. Jacobus sent a cease-and-desist letter to Trump and his top aide, citing electronic messages that showed the Trump campaign had courted her and not the other way around. "I have been trashed and ruined on Twitter," Jacobus says adding that Trump's lawyers had responded to her letter, but that they had not yet reached a resolution. "At what point does it cross the line into something that's defamatory and might be actionable?" says Parry Aftab, a lawyer who leads the Internet safety group WiredSafety. "At what point does it cross the line into encouraging violence against groups and individuals?"
It's been my theory all along that Trump is trolling the Republican party. I am also not much surprised that this has been an effective method for gaining support from some of their followers.
Ideology: A tool used primarily to avoid the bother of thinking.
If only Twitter could appoint a committee with Anita Sarkeesian in charge to ban all those nasty conservatives who abuse their "free speech" to say things good liberals find offensive.
Oh wait, they already have.
SJW's don't eliminate discrimination. They just expropriate it for themselves.
Friend, I am only a few years younger than you, and believe you me, I have a sense of humor (although it's sometimes rather sick and twisted), but please, reassure me you're kidding about this!
Donald Trump needs to go. He'll destroy this country and maybe start World War 3. Not qualified in any way shape or form to be POTUS. Not that any candidate from any party is either, but he's literally the worst of the worst.
Are YOU using the TOOL, or is the TOOL using YOU? Think about it!
Actually, I think this comparison is better than "Trump = Hitler": http://qz.com/624065/a-tip-to-americans-from-an-italian-who-saw-berlusconi-get-elected-again-and-again-and-again/
Trump seems like the American version of Italy's Berlusconi - a buffoon who nobody took seriously, who won the election, and who ruined his country.
My sci-fi novel, Ghost Thief, is now available from Amazon.com.
Or is this story about people dumb enough to read and react to what this guy says?
Curiously, a lot of hay has been made about Trump's support from uneducated voters, largely from this poll, page 36, which puts percent of supporters with "college degree" at 46%.
The press, of course, is quick to point out that 46% is less than half, so they proclaim far and wide that his supporters are "mostly uneducated".
What the press doesn't note, however, is that 70 % of Americans don't have a degree.
Trumps supporters are more educated than the population average.
Feel free to call us dumb, it helps us change our vote to $your candidate!
(Oh, hey! Want to go out behind the trailer and shoot at beer cans with my .22?)
Lol, i can't tell if you are joking or you think you are serious. If you think Trump is going to do anything other than lose the election if he's nominated you are smoking some very good dope. It isn't a secret that the millennials are the first young generation that's voting, they just only do it on the presidential elections. They drastically outnumber both the boomers and GenX and they will have total control of the political system in about 10 years.
Trump is a property developer. When you look at your local politics and see corruption and backdoor deals it's because most of your local politicians are property developers. If the republican party is foolish enough to nominate him all the stuff he's said and done over the years is going to come out and it's going to be very very bad.
Of course Trump is trolling America. He doesn't actually want to be President. When you're President your entire life is determined by preset schedules. You have to meet heads of states and attend cabinet meetings and perform the duties required of the President. Trump doesn't seriously want to deal with any of that crap. He's going to push this thing as far as he can, like the guy from Office Space, because Trump has no fcuks to give. He's just having a good time. And if somehow he does actually become President he'll play along for a month or two and then resign, giving the office to Omarosa.
The Moore-Murphy Law: The number of things that will go wrong will double every 2 years.
That's just it. The vast majority of people have called their representative, senator, Governor, or President that or worse at one time or another. The moment most politicians get in front of the cameras, they're walking on eggshells being careful not to offend anyone. They carefully vet their political stances with trial balloons, surveys, and marketing research before actually proclaiming it as their stance.
Trump doesn't do that. He calls important people a pussy on national TV as easily as the common man does it at the bar or the office cooler. That's what's driving his popularity - he's an anti-politicians. He acts like regular people act, with none of the pretense politicians wear, none of the false gratuity they give off. Given how fed up the electorate is with politicians (Congress' approval rating was just 11% in the latest poll), it's a strategy which may actually work.
I don't particularly like Trump, but I think it's good that we're finally getting a candidate who's doing what he's doing. For too long now, people have expected their politicians to be perfect little angels with no blemish on their record, no skeletons in their closet. Nobody is perfect. Everyone has done something considered "wrong" in their past (whether it be smoking pot or shoplifting or mooning the school principal). Everyone has skeletons in their closet. If you demand a perfectly clean record from political candidates, the only people who can succeed at politics are pathological liars who are great at covering up their flaws.
See, the reason you say he needs an attitude adjustment isn't because he called the Governor a pussy. If that's your standard, then 3/4ths of the country needs an attitude adjustment. The reason is because he said it on national TV, and for some arbitrary reason we just expect people to behave better on TV than they do in real life. Look at all the open mic gaffes, where politicians have been caught saying what they really think instead of what they say in front of the cameras. That's the disconnect people expect between what politicians say, and what they actually think. Would you rather have a candidate who actually says what he thinks? Or a candidate who thinks one thing, but says another in front of the cameras?
Yes, he has a remarkable knack for picking up angry soundbites in the crowd and amplifying them back at the audience. Some people see this as a clever politics, his followers don't see it at. But I dare say the vast majority of the english speaking world see it as embarrassingly obvious.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.