Twitter, Trump, and the Base: A Shift to a New Form of Presidential Talk?

The 2016 US Presidential campaign saw the meteoric rise to power of Donald J. Trump, unprecedented perhaps in the history of American politics not only for its style but also for its unswerving “address” (Lempert and Silverstein 2012) to a “base” that was large enough to give Trump an electoral college victory. This talk was connected most distinctively (though of course not exclusively) to the social media platform Twitter. This article provides what is arguably the first anthropological linguistic analysis of Twitter, while also interrogating for the first time Trump’s use of Twitter as a speech practice. It is no doubt too soon to tell, but it is suggested here that rather than the broad-spectrum address of the message that has heretofore characterized much of the history of presidential campaigns, Trump’s social-media address to a base may mark a shift in the rise of presidential talk to come.