Trump Twitter And The American Democracy

This book takes a social science approach to address two related questions: (1) what does Donald Trump say on Twitter? and (2) why? Since entering the 2016 Presidential Election, Donald Trump’s tweets have been a major part of his communications strategy with the public. While the popular media has devoted considerable attention to selected tweets, it is less clear what those selected tweets tell us about Trump the businessman, the political candidate, and, finally, the President of the United States. We argue that to fully understand Trump, we must take a more comprehensive approach to examining all of his activities on Twitter. Overall, our analysis presents a strikingly complex picture of Trump and how he uses Twitter. Not only has his pattern of tweets changed over time, we find that Trump’s use of Twitter is more deliberate than he has been given credit. Like most other politicians, Trump is strategically-minded about his presence on social media.

Curing the causes and consequences of Trumpism It's no secret that the United States faces extraordinary political and societal challenges, even as it recovers from the COVID-19 pandemic. Political polarization and extremism are the most apparent symptoms, resulting from long-term economic and social inequities as well as a toxic information ecosystem. It is easy to blame Donald Trump for the sad state of American democracy. After all, he abused his executive authority, spread false claims, and even incited violence. But Trumpism is almost certain to outlast Trump himself. The grievances he exploited and the aggrieved to whom he appealed existed well before he became president and likely will endure after he is gone from the political scene. The current political atmosphere is poisonous for those who operate on the basis of facts, reason, and logic. It is time to step back from this dangerous precipice and reflect on the causes of the serious threats to American democracy, procedural justice, and a reason-based society. With polarization now entrenched and authoritarianism gaining strength, no one should assume that facts somehow will triumph over falsehoods and reason will prevail over emotion. Drawing on his personal experiences in the D.C. policy world, Darrell West offers advice for protecting people, organizations, and the country as a whole from our contemporary challenges. This book makes the risks to democracy understandable by explaining specific threats and offering concrete ideas for ameliorating them. It will appeal to anyone interested in American politics, democracy, elections, mass media, technology, and governance.

The Twitter Presidency explores the rhetorical style of President Donald J. Trump, attending to both his general manner of speaking as well as to his preferred modality. Trump’s manner, the authors argue, reflects an aesthetics of white rage, and it is rooted in authoritarianism, narcissism, and demagoguery. His preferred modality of speaking, namely through Twitter, effectively channels and transmits the affective dimensions of white rage by taking advantage of the platform’s defining characteristics, which include simplicity, impulsivity, and incivility. There is, then, a structural homology between Trump’s general communication practices and the specific platform (Twitter) he uses to communicate with his base. This commonality between communication practices and communication platform (manner and modality) struck a powerful emotive chord with his followers, who feel aggrieved at the decentering of white masculinity. In addition to charting the defining characteristics of Trump’s discourse, The Twitter Presidency exposes how Trump’s rhetorical style threatens democratic norms, principles, and institutions.

The New York Times bestseller “A clear and concise account of the history, diplomacy, economics, and societal forces that have molded the modern global system.” —Foreign Affairs An invaluable primer from Richard Haass, president of the Council on Foreign Relations, that will help anyone, expert and non-expert alike, navigate a time in which many of our biggest challenges come from the world beyond our borders. Like it or not, we live in a global era, in which what happens thousands of miles away has the ability to affect our lives. This time, it is a Coronavirus known as Covid-19, which originated in a Chinese city many had never heard of but has spread to the corners of the earth. Next time it could well be another infectious disease from somewhere else. Twenty years ago it was a group of terrorists trained in Afghanistan and armed with box-cutters who commandeered four airplanes and flew them into buildings (and in one case a field) and claimed nearly three thousand lives. Next time it could be terrorists who use a truck bomb or gain access to a weapon of mass destruction. In 2016 hackers in a nondescript office building in Russia traveled virtually in cyberspace to manipulate America's elections. Now they have burrowed into our political life. In recent years, severe hurricanes and large fires linked to climate change have ravaged parts of the earth; in the future we can anticipate even more serious natural disasters. In 2008, it was a global financial crisis caused by mortgage-backed securities in America, but one day it could well be a financial contagion originating in Europe, Asia, or Africa. This is the new normal of the 21st century. The World is designed to provide readers of any age and experience with the essential background and building blocks they need to make sense of this complicated and interconnected world. It will empower them to manage the flood of daily news. Readers will become more informed, discerning citizens, better able to arrive at sound, independent judgments. While it is impossible to predict what the next crisis will be or where it will originate, those who read The World will have what they need to understand its basics and the principal choices for how to respond. In short, this book will make readers more globally literate and put them in a position to make sense of this era. Global literacy--knowing how the world works—is a must, as what goes on outside a country matters enormously to what happens inside. Although the United States is bordered by two oceans, those oceans are not moats. And the so-called Vegas rule—what happens there stays there—does not apply in today's world to anyone anywhere. U.S. foreign policy is uniquely American, but the world Americans seek to shape is not. Globalization can be both good and bad, but it is not something that individuals or countries can opt out of. Even if we want to ignore the world, it will not ignore us. The choice we face is how to respond. We are connected to this world in all sorts of ways. We need to better understand it, both its promise and its threats, in order to make informed choices, be it as students, citizens, voters, parents, employees, or investors. To help readers do just that, The World focuses on essential history, what makes each region of the world tick, the many challenges globalization presents, and the most influential countries, events, and ideas. Explaining complex ideas with wisdom and clarity, Richard Haass's The World is an evergreen book that will remain relevant and useful as history continues to unfold.

"I don't take responsibility at all." Those words of Donald Trump at a March 13, 2020, press conference are likely to be history's epitaph on his presidency. A huge swath of Americans has put their faith in Trump, and Trump only, because they see the rest of the country building a future that doesn’t have a place for them. If they would risk their lives for Trump in a pandemic, they will certainly risk the stability of American democracy. They brought the Trumpocalypse upon the country, and a post-Trumpocalypse country will have to find a way either to reconcile them to democracy - or to protect democracy from them. In Trumpocalypse, David Frum looks at what happens when a third of the electorate refuses to abandon Donald Trump, no matter what he does. Those voters aren’t looking for policy wins. They’re seeking cultural revenge. It is not enough to defeat Donald Trump on election day 2020. Even if Trump peacefully departs office, the trauma he inflicted will distort American and world politics for years to come. Americans must start from where they are, build from what they have, to repair the damage Trump inflicted on the country, to amend the wrongs that, under Trump, they inflicted upon each other. Americans can do better. David Frum shows how—and inspires all readers of all points of view to believe again in the possibilities of American life. Trumpocalypse is both a warning of danger and a guide to reform that will be read and discussed for years to come.

A New York Times Editors’ Choice An “essential” (Jane Mayer) account of the dangerous marriage of plutocratic economic priorities and right-wing populist appeals — and how it threatens the pillars of American democracy. In Let Them Eat Tweets, best-selling political scientists Jacob S. Hacker and Paul Pierson argue that despite the rhetoric of Donald Trump, Josh Hawley, and other right-wing “populists,” the Republican Party came to serve its plutocratic masters to a degree without precedent in modern global history. To maintain power while serving the 0.1 percent, the GOP has relied on increasingly incendiary racial and cultural appeals to its almost entirely white base. Calling this dangerous hybrid “plutocratic populism,” Hacker and Pierson show how, over the last forty years, reactionary plutocrats and right-wing populists have become the two faces of a party that now actively undermines democracy to achieve its goals against the will of the majority of Americans. Based on decades of research and featuring a new epilogue about the intensification of GOP radicalism after the 2020 election, Let Them Eat Tweets authoritatively explains the doom loop of tax cutting and fearmongering that defines the Republican Party—and reveals how the rest of us can fight back.

How policies forged after September 11 were weaponized under Trump and turned on American democracy itself In the wake of the September 11 terror attacks, the American government implemented a wave of overt policies to fight the nation’s enemies. Unseen and undetected by the public, however, another set of tools was brought to bear on the domestic front. In this riveting book, one of today’s leading experts on the US security state shows how these “subtle tools” imperiled the very foundations of democracy, from the separation of powers and transparency in government to adherence to the Constitution. Taking readers from Ground Zero to the Capitol insurrection, Karen Greenberg describes the subtle tools that were forged under George W. Bush in the name of security: imprecise language, bureaucratic confusion, secrecy, and the bypassing of procedural and legal norms. While the power and legacy of these tools lasted into the Obama years, reliance on them increased exponentially in the Trump era, both in the fight against terrorism abroad and in battles closer to home. Greenberg discusses how the Trump administration weaponized these tools to separate families at the border, suppress Black Lives Matter protests, and attempt to overturn the 2020 presidential election. Revealing the deeper consequences of the war on terror, Subtle Tools paints a troubling portrait of an increasingly undemocratic America where disinformation, xenophobia, and disdain for the law became the new norm, and where the subtle tools of national security threatened democracy itself.

This book assembles six chapters by respected and emerging scholars in political science and communication to produce a first sustained look at Twitter's role in the 2016 US Presidential Election. While much attention has already been paid to Trump's use of Twitter as a phenomenon—how it helps drive news cycles, distracts attention from other matters, or levies attacks against rivals, the news media, and other critics—there has been little scholarly analysis of the impact Twitter played in the actual election. These chapters apply an impressive diversity of theoretical explanations and methodological approaches to explore how this new technology shaped an American election, and what impact it could have in the future.