Since he became president, Donald Trump has used Twitter more than 2,000 times, waxing eloquent in 280 characters or less on “Crooked Hillary,” “Low IQ Crazy Mika,” and a host of other issues ranging from the dismissive (a disinvite to a New Year’s Eve party) to the deadly serious (a potential nuclear standoff with North Korea). Number 45 tweets so often that there are dual accounts, one for official business (@POTUS) and another for private musings (@realDonaldTrump). In all likelihood, Mr. Trump will be the first US president to have a separate section in his presidential library dedicated solely to his tweets and use of social media.

There is no doubt this is an historic presidency in terms of its transparency and immediacy. It is the presidency of the second wave of Millennials who define and shape the world of social media. No longer do traditional major TV or cable news networks wield the powers of news making and agenda setting. Twitter, Instagram, Snapchat, YouTube, and Facebook have infiltrated the journalistic battlefield and are there to stay. The oligarchies of the major media outlets in the context of what we as news consumers have access to have gone the way of the Roman Empire. President Trump is representative of this new wave of uncensored openness and new social media winning strategies.

There has been a litany of complaints about the president’s use of his private Twitter account since he took office with most stating that, at the very least, it is not befitting of the president to have such a public presence outside of traditional settings such as White House news briefings. Following the Monica Lewinsky affair, President Bill Clinton stated that even presidents had the right to a private life. If so then maybe President Trump has the right to a public one. It is not as if 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue is an impenetrable lead box in terms of the private lives of the First Families. Since the age of television, presidents, First Ladies, and their children have had an impact on public preference and product perception. A classic example is in the world of US sports. Since the Gilded Age, baseball had been “America’s Game” played as far back as during lulls in battle during the Civil War. Babe Ruth was as much an “American icon” as George Washington.

Then came the presidential election of 1960 when a tousled young millionaire Senator named John Fitzgerald Kennedy (JFK) from Massachusetts and his cosmopolitan wife Jackie took up residence in the White House. Their summer retreat in Hyannis Port, Massachusetts, and the beaches nearby were spontaneous touch football fields where even famous National Football League (NFL) players received invitations to join in on the fun. The age of Camelot brought about the pillbox hat and a penchant for flinging the pigskin around the front yard like their athletic young president. Today, the Super Bowl is annually the most-watched televised event of the year in the USA, and Super Bowl Sunday is as close to a national holiday as you can get without actually being one. Not to put too fine a point on it, but try to remember the last World Series party you were invited to. The NFL, of course, was thrilled, and is still today, but corporations generally avoid connections of their products and brands with political positions (Matos, Vinauales, & Sheinin, 2017), and presidents certainly put forth their sentiments on political issues. That being said, it is sometimes simply unavoidable for a product to be associated with a particular occupant of the Oval Office, be it positive or negative.

The Kennedy-NFL branding connection was not just a one-shot deal. The US public follows the First Family almost as rabidly in terms of trend as its British counterparts across the Atlantic follow the House of Windsor. Jellybean manufacturers cheered, and gourmet jellybean stores popped up in malls across the country during the presidency of Ronald Reagan when the public came to know he kept a large bowl of jellybeans on his desk in the Oval Office to snack on. Broccoli farmers cringed when President George Bush, Reagan’s successor, announced publicly he hated broccoli and refused to eat it. Bill Clinton’s yearning for McDonald’s Big Macs that dated back to his boyhood days in Hope, Arkansas, probably filled Burger King boardrooms with angst throughout the 1990s. We also gleefully filled out our NCAA¹ Basketball Tournament pool sheets with President Obama for eight years, office policy be damned. President Trump is no different in this regard. The president’s private account has more than 32 million followers (Burke, 2017). Perhaps, his Twitter usage is the equivalent of that perfect spiral for a touchdown from JFK to RFK² on a Massachusetts beach back in 1961.

The president himself is also a product that is subject to branding, and so is the nation he leads and represents. Donald Trump was not the first president to make effective use of social media tools – that would be Barack Obama – but he has been able to brand himself effectively throughout the Republican primaries straight through his general election victory. The parallels of strategy between the two campaigns are striking: Obama clearly went for the Kennedy-esque, offering youth and vigor with the hallmark “Change We Can Believe In,” while Trump deftly tapped in to Ronald Reagan’s strong-man populist appeal with “Make America Great Again” that echoes in the same timbre as the Great Communicator’s hallmark slogan “It’s Morning in America.” Zavattaro (2010) correctly concluded that presidential politics is now candidate-centered, as opposed to platform-centered. Thus, direct informal presidential communication with the electorate not only is advisable but also may be habitual in the future.

One of the controversies swirling around Trump’s tweeting habits is that many critics feel he is harming the US reputation abroad with his actions, especially when he engages in a back-and-forth exchange with a political rival (foreign or domestic) or member of the media. This “reputation” of the USA is just another way of branding (Garbacz-Rawson, 2007) – only it is the nation itself, as opposed to the individual leading it. The “America First” style of nation branding that Trump prefers (tight borders, limited immigration, and projection of economic and military power) enamors him to his base but chafes those who believe that the twenty-first century is an era of globalization. This zero-sum game about where the USA is going, how it is doing, and what it should be is a good deal of what fuels the fire of what we now call the “fake news|” controversy. Trump’s political opponents view the White House as a font of untruths and flat-out lies, while the administration sees the mainstream media as manufacturing false information just to stymie the president’s agenda and drag down his approval ratings. The president has taken to Twitter at every available opportunity to fire back at who he calls the real purveyors of “fake news,” even offering a trophy to the least credible of the lot, by which he means every outlet with the exception of Fox News (Segodnya, 2017).

Many see Trump as machine-gunning the whole media crowd from the stately New York Times to the world-renowned CNN³ with nothing but blanks as these outlets are trusted implicitly to report in an unbiased and even-handed fashion. There exists, however, evidence to the contrary that provides powder for the president’s shells. As it turns out, “fake news” in the mainstream media does exist (Herman, 2017), and it does so in the form of the presentation of misleading information as well as sweeping under the proverbial rug any story that calls into question already accepted dogma. This does not mean that the president has been completely and utterly truthful in every tweet. The New York Times is clearly not “failing,” and CNN’s ratings have not hit “rock-bottom” as the president has either stated implicitly or implied over Twitter. Previous presidents have had testy relations with the press, but few have retaliated with the zeal that Trump has. In examining his personal tweets that generate all the attention (as opposed to the arid official @POTUS versions), not all his tweets are about the so-called “fake media.” An excellent question to ask, and one the research here takes up is, what motivates the president to pick up his smartphone? Or, conversely, does anything give Mr. Trump pause on the keyboard? It is these queries that drive the hypotheses behind the model the forthcoming paragraphs will outline.

The regression model in the present research is based on the premise that the president has partial motivation to tweet from his desire to combat “fake news” as he sees it and, thus, the model has representations of the primary sources of his complaints on the matter, those on cable. Obviously, worrying about “fake news” is not Mr. Trump’s sole concern as chief executive, so the model will include other explanatory variables to account for the day-to-day influences that a president is likely to encounter and that encourage him to tweet.

For this analysis, all of Mr. Trump’s private account tweets from the day of his inauguration to the last day of 2017 from All the President’s Tweets from CNN.com comprise the data set. This data set does not take into account all of the president’s tweets prior to his inauguration. For the purposes of this research, the private account serves as the source of the data set. For the independent variables representing the three cable news networks in the model, all the weekly prime-time ratings of the 49 weeks from Mr. Trump’s inauguration to the end of 2017 represent them numerically in the model. The source of the data set is www.adweek.com/tvnewser. Significant US news events, significant world news events, and unexpected disasters’ source is 2017 Current EventsInfoplease, yielding a total of 49 cases (N = 49).

Number of Tweets On Personal Twitter Account Per Week = a + b1(CNN) + b2(FoxNews) + b3(MSNBC) + b4(USNewsEvent) + b5(WorldNewsEvent) + b6 (UnexpectedDisaster) + e

The model overall performed fairly well with four of the six explanatory variables reaching significance with an R-square value of .44 (see Table A2 of the Appendix). Two of the cable news media variables came up significant (CNN and Fox News) and in the correct direction as predicted validating those hypotheses. The Beta weights for both are robust indicating impact as well as significance. The failure of the MSNBC variable to reach significance by a long shot and the anemic Beta weight is perhaps the model’s major shortcoming. Perhaps, this author placed far too much emphasis on the skirmish between the president and the hosts of MSNBC’s Morning Joe and overestimated the importance of the network’s new found success in the ratings war. More attention should also have probably been paid to the tweet where the president stated that the hosts of Morning Joe were not necessarily bad people, just put under pressure by network executives to discredit the president in their reporting. Another surprise in the model was the failure of World News Events to reach significance along with a similarly tepid Beta weight. Given the criticism of the Obama administration with regard to handling ISIS and reports of his own success with rolling the Islamic State back under his watch along with the exchanges with Kim Jong-un that had the nuclear war Chicken Littles out in force, it was a surprise to see this part of the model fail. One would think that these ongoing events would be a major motivating factor for the president to start typing, but surprisingly enough, this was not the case.

Perhaps, though, we are dealing with a president that is more interested and adept at the domestic than the foreign. The two presidencies thesis, in which the presidency is divided into two separate spheres, one foreign and one domestic (Canes-Wrone, Howell, & Lewis, 2008) seems to be in play here. If one examines the president’s tweets, there is a distinct domestic bent in terms of subject matter and area. Job creation, the border wall, immigration policy, healthcare, and tax reform are all major issues the president has tweeted on repeatedly during the first year of his presidency with his first major legislative victory being in the domestic area of tax policy. Bill Clinton was no different. The president who turned a major deficit into a surplus in his eight years in office could sport no major foreign policy trophy. Conversely, Ronald Reagan arguably won the Cold War by beating the Russian bear to death with a checkbook but left a budget deficit of historic proportions for his successors to grapple with. Maybe if Clinton and Reagan were president in the age of today’s social media, they would have tweeted in the areas of their respective expertise, be it domestic or foreign affairs.

The explanatory variable US News Events performed as expected. Along the lines of the two presidencies thesis discussion in the previous paragraph, if Mr. Trump falls in the category of a president who favors the domestic side of the presidency, then it stands to reason that news on the home front will be his forte. That certainly came through in the model and in the examination of his individual tweets no topic is out of the realm of the president’s twitter commentary reach. The best example would be the flap over the kneeling of National Football League players during the playing of the national anthem before games. It was started by former San Francisco 49ers player Colin Kaepernick to protest racial injustice across the USA. Trump sees it as a blatant disrespect for the American flag and all who fought to defend it. Trump’s supporters and a good deal of NFL fans agree with him. The president fired off a fusillade of tweets that lasted weeks that called for boycotting of games, refusing to watch games on TV (Trump the ratings maven at his best again) and called out everyone from the NFL commissioner’s office on down to individual players. He praised owners who demanded their players stand for the anthem and made sure everyone knew when Vice President Pence walked out of an Indianapolis Colts game when some players took a knee during the anthem. Never has a sitting president become involved in such a way in dealing with a protest during a sporting event. God only knows how he would have dealt with the raised Black Power fists at the 1968 Olympics in Mexico City, but with the 2018 Winter Olympics days away, you can bet the US athletes will be standing rock-steady for our national anthem.

Being commander-in-chief often entails being reassuring-voice-in- chief. This often happens at the spur of the moment, when the president least expects it or finds it politically expedient. Such was the problem in 2017 during the months of August through October when Hurricanes Harvey, Irma, and Maria arrived in the Atlantic basin. A high-energy person thrives under these circumstances and our current president certainly fits the description. That the Unexpected Disasters variable performed best of all with the “heaviest” Beta weight and significance at the p<.005 level was not surprising given that Trump seems to feed off of excitement and challenges and the threat of a monster landfalling hurricane certainly provides those. The president turned amateur meteorologist from the outset, tweeting about the storms while they were still well offshore, advising the populace that he was watching them. He did not stop there, tweeting especially during Harvey and Irma in all caps “we are with you” to the people affected as a reminder that they were not old news in the Oval Office. Moreover, it seemed genuine and heartfelt and expressed the sentiments of an entire nation in a single tweet, a significant departure from the politically motivated messages designed to deliver a blow or drive home a point. It was one human being reaching out to others in a firm reassuring tone that in the end, everything was going to be alright, and we were all in this together. For Trump, they were perhaps the finest hours of his presidency to date, eclipsing the tax overhaul victory easily, at least from this vantage point. Crises often bring out the better angels of our nature and this was the case for the president. If one can call the bird that serves as the logo for Twitter a dove, during and following the hurricanes Number 45’s tweets were olive branches and rainbows to people who needed to know their president cared.

The model here only scratches the surface of this particular line of research. It is groundbreaking, unique, and a worthy addition as a subfield of presidential studies. One thing that intrigued me while conducting this research was the times at which the tweets were sent, especially in response to a particular event. This author would like to see future efforts in this area focus on “time lapse.” That is, the time that elapses between a specific event occurring and a tweet on that subject from the president. The level of immediacy and its interpretation would open up a whole new avenue in how presidential administrations are structured. For example, a long time lapse would allow for consultation with advisors, a polished draft, and the like. An immediate burst would indicate the president’s own thoughts “straight off the cuff.” Even time of day would be significant. It would be interesting to see how many times the president “tweets from the hip,” as opposed to ones with a delayed response time. This could be a measure of how the president is using (or not) his White House staff and Cabinet for advice and would advance the study of White House communication procedural dynamics in the process.

Whether the next president uses social media to the extent that President Trump does is a matter of conjecture, but at this juncture, we are undeniably in the age of the “Twitter Presidency.” The battle over whose news is “authentic” and whose news is “fake news” no doubt will continue to rage on and will not be solved by even the best White House correspondent since Helen Thomas or the most eloquent White House Press Secretary since Pierre Salinger. The fact of the matter is we are at the dawn of a new age in presidential politics, where ideas and opinions are delivered through new unfiltered channels to be digested directly by the constituency without any fillers or by-products from the traditional journalistic sources.

The “Twitter Presidency” is alive and well and shows no signs of going the way of the pet rock or the mullet. It undeniably reaches a generation raised on tweets, Instagram posts, Snapchats, and Houseparty hookups and subconsciously makes them part of the political process, whether the action is a nod in agreement, an angry tweet fired back, or a headshake in dismay. “Fake news” may be a plague upon the land due to it being the lord of lies but the controversy it has created has put a stake through the heart of the monster known as political alienation. Today, social media is electric with political chatter with reference to the president’s tweets on both sides of the political aisle with the young leading the way with over 40% of Twitter users between the ages of 18 and 34, according to Statista. That bodes well for our electoral future as that number will undoubtedly rise and more age groups embrace the potential of political efficacy of social media outlets like Twitter. This author is not one of the 40% in that key demographic, but you can follow his tweets at @DrBrez, where all the news is never fake.

• 1    Do you think the “Twitter Presidency” is one-time phenomenon based on the personality of one individual or is it a model for future office holders to follow? Explain.

• 2    2 Some say that it is “unbecoming” of a president to utilize social media in the way that President Trump has. Others disagree stating that since George Washington there has been no presidential etiquette rulebook that occupants of the Oval Office must follow. Which statement do you think is most correct, and why?

• 3    Some have suggested that purveyors of “fake news” be punished in some way for misleading the public, while staunch advocates of the First Amendment’s right to free speech say it gives media or social media outlets the right to lie, as long as they do not defame the subject, and it is up to the news consumer to “do his or her homework” and fact-check. Do you think there should be some sort of informal sanction on those who purposely mislead the public, or is everyone responsible for his or her own vetting of any news story? Explain.

• 4    One of the major criticisms of the “Twitter Presidency” is in the area of foreign policy. Some experts feel the president’s tweets give too much information away as to US diplomatic and military strategy, which could have negative consequences should an international crisis arise. Do you think the president jeopardizes national security with the content of his tweets on foreign policy issues? Why, or why not?

• 5    With the advent of the “Twitter Presidency,” some have argued that the position of White House Press Secretary has been diminished significantly, with people paying more attention to the president’s tweets than what is said at White House press briefings. Has social media in the White House put the position of Press Secretary on the road to obsolescence? Why, or why not?

Brezenski, T. F. (2018). Twitter me this: Fake news, real issues, and the Twitter presidency. In H. Gringarten, & R. Fernández-Calienes (Eds.). Ethical branding and marketing: Cases and lessons (pp. 19–34). Routledge Management and Business Studies Series. London and New York: Routledge.

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2. Burke, S. (2017, June 17). How many social followers does Trump actually have? @CNNTech. Retrieved from http://money.com/2017/06/17/technology/trump-social-media-followers/index.html

3. Canes-Wrone, B., Howell, W., & Lewis, D. (2008, January). Toward a broader understanding of presidential power: A reevaluation of the two presidencies thesis. The Journal of Politics, 70(1), 1–16. Stable URL: http://www.www.jstor.org/stable/10.1017/s0022381607080061

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7. Herman, E. (2017, July–August). Fake news on Russia and other official enemies. Monthly Review. Retrieved from http://search.proquest.com/central/docview/1927794767/8a4fd73A9CFC418EPQ15?accountid=14129

8. Matos, G., Vinuales, G., & Sheinin, D. (2017, Spring). The power of politics in branding. Journal of Marketing Theory and Practice, 25(2), 125–140. doi:10. 1080/10696679.2016.1270768

9. Segodnya, R. (2017, November 27). Trump offers trophy to ‘Most Dishonest’ US News network for coverage of his Presidency. Sputnik-Moscow, 1–2. Retrieved from http://proxy.stu.edu:2048/login?url=https://search.proquest.com/docview/1968418460?accountid=14129

10. Tornoe, R. (2017, November 30). Was Trump’s morning joe spiked? Philadelphia Daily News. Retrieved from http://proxy.stu.edu:2048/login?url=https://search.proquest.com/docview/1970426871?accountid=14129

11. Zavattaro, S. (2010, March). Brand Obama: The implications of a branded president. Administration Theory & Praxis, 32(1), 123–128. doi:10.2753/ATP1084-1806320108