Analyzing trump’s twitter: top themes from 36k tweets

Trump’s tweets in a word cloud

To build the word cloud, I downloaded Trump’s entire Twitter history, excluding retweets, (an impressive 36.4K tweets) from . Then I used R to filter out the common words from the data set (things like articles, prepositions, pronouns, auxiliary verbs, etc.), along with the President’s name, and count the occurrences of every word throughout the president’s Twitter history (you can view the entire list of words here). Lastly, I built a word cloud out of the 100 most frequently mentioned words using wordcloud2. For individual words I found interesting, I also plotted time series graphs with the help of Dygraphs to see how their usage changed over time.

Trump’s most used words on Twitter (all time)

Above, you can see the words most frequently mentioned by Trump in his tweets over almost 10 years. Exciting, huh? Now, let’s see how the top themes dominating Trump’s Twitter have evolved in the last 3 months (October 8, 2018 through January 8, 2019):

Trump’s most used words on Twitter (last 3 months)

And finally, let’s take a look at @realDonaldTrump’s most used words on Twitter over the last month (December 8, 2018 to January 8, 2019):

Trump’s most used words on Twitter (last month)

As you can see, the last month has been quite a change in terms of language, with certain words outranking the president’s all time favourite, “great”. Now, let’s look at some words up close.

Соцсети и СМИ: противостояние

Твиттер, как и социальные сети в целом, давно подвинули средства массовой информации на второй план.

Некоторые СМИ пытаются шагать в ногу со временем и заводят странички в соцсетях, но неизменно проигрывают и там, поскольку отдельные громкие медиаперсоны имеют гораздо более широкое влияние благодаря своей популярности.

На аккаунты подобных личностей подписаны сотни миллионов фолловеров и можно только представить, на что способен один единственный пост.

А если еще таким человеком будет не безобидный бьюти-блоггер, а президент самой богатой страны мира – думайте сами. Число подписчиков Дональда Трампа и Барака Обамы в совокупности переваливает за 150 миллионов, в то время как топовые СМИ Америки едва набирают 120 млн.

И к кому будут прислушиваться в первую очередь? К массмедиа, новости которых изобилуют лишней информацией, или к первоисточнику важных заявлений?

Ну, думаю, Вы поняли.

IMPORTANT UPDATE

On January 8th 2021, Twitter decided to permanently suspend Donald Trump’s Twitter account. If you want to analyze the impact of the suspension you can create a Twitter Report. Trump’s activity before the suspension:

• 59,553 Tweets and Retweets
• 46,919 Tweets (Original tweets)
• 12,634 Retweets
• 88,936,841 Followers
• 51 Following
• 389,842,552 Retweets received
• 1,659,180,779 Likes received
• March 18th 2009 Opened his Twitter account
• May 4th 2009 Sent his first Tweet
• Twitter for iPhone Favorite tool to tweet (17,260 tweets sent)
• “Tonight, @FLOTUS and I tested positive for COVID-19. We will begin our quarantine and recovery process immediately. We will get through this TOGETHER!” Most retweeted tweet (416,342 retweets) October 11th 2020
• “To all of those who have asked, I will not be going to the Inauguration on January 20th.” Last tweet sent January, 8th 2021
• “45th President of the United States of America” Last Twitter Bio

This is how the Twitter profile of Donald Trump is looking after the suspension

Twitter took this measure after the tweets from the former President and the attack to the Capitol. It is amazing how the mentions to Donald Trump hit a maximum even during a month where he was mentioned a lot on Twitter. 16M and 17M tweets per day:

These are the mentions of Donal Trump since Dec 12th 2020 until Jan 9th 2021. The peak during the attack to the Capitol is remarkable.

This is the tweet by Twitter announcing the suspension of Trump’s Twitter account:

Donald Trump 2,021 Twitter activity

The first days of 2,021 Donald Trump increased his Twitter activity. Trump shared almost 150 tweets since the start of the new year. Most of the tweets he shared were original tweets and all of them where sent from iPhone. These are some of the Twitter data we have got with our Twitter analytics tool.

Tweet Binder Twitter report for @realdonaldtrump tweets in 2021

In addition, this was his most most retweeted tweet this year:

And this tweet was the most expensive tweet he has recently shared:

However, Twitter Safety’s account has deleted some of his tweets due to the gravity of the situation developed in Washington the 6th of January 2,021:

Как президент США управляет общественностью

Дональд Трамп завел страницу в Твиттере в 2009 году и на текущий момент у него более 45 тысяч постов на самые разные темы. С момента вступления Трампа в должность президента тематический спектр его твитов сузился до экономики и политики.

На его аккаунт подписано свыше 65 миллионов человек, а если еще учесть, что посты многократно ретвитят, то аудитория увидевших опубликованную информацию раздувается до немыслимых масштабов.

Даже случайно брошенная фраза может вызвать ту или иную реакцию миллионов людей.

В иных случаях открытые заявления в Твиттере могут даже спровоцировать вооруженное сопротивление, что едва не произошло в ходе спора Трампа с лидером Северной Кореи.

Могут ли твиты обвалить рынок

Если политические перебранки можно перевести в русло дипломатического диалога, то последствия от твитов, затрагивающих финансовую нишу, предотвратить куда труднее.

Так, негативный пост директора какой-либо компании может повлечь падение акций фирмы, и напротив, публикация технических характеристик секретного инновационного продукта определенно повысит котировки производителя.

Одним из таких примеров служит Apple: в своем твиттере компания делает новостные обзоры, а многомиллионные ретвиты поднимают цены на акции.

Аналогичный алгоритм действует и при распространении постов Трампа в среде инвесторов. Как только американский президент объявил о повышении ввозных пошлин на товары из Китая на 15 %, мировые индексы резко ушли вниз.

И как следствие – торговая война США и Китая получила второе дыхание.

Похожая ситуация произошла, когда Дональд Трамп опубликовал категоричное высказывание о китайской фирме Huawei, обвиняющейся в поставке на территорию Америки шпионского оборудования.

Последствия временных санкций в отношении корпорации не обошли и акции сторонних компаний, которые сотрудничали с Huawei. Кроме того, пользователи гаджетов данной компании после твита Трампа стали быстро избавляться от техники.

Donald Trump Twitter archive and stats

Trump’s latest tweets are always on TV, imagine all the news that are based just on his tweets. Well, Donald Trump has shared almost 47K original tweets since 2009. We do not count the RTs he makes, just the original tweets he has written and sent. Donald Trump original tweets are 46,919tweets divided in:

• 30,572 text tweets: tweets containing only text (no link, no pic, etc.)
• 3,624 replies: tweets where he replies to other users (however, in this case, he’s also replying to himself when creating threads)
• 12,906 links or images (some of these tweets are also replies, so we don’t count them twice)

Twitter historical report: @realdonaldtrump tweets since 2009

Evolution of tweets sent by Donald Trump since 2009

Donald Trump Twitter’s account was opened in 2009. Since then he has sent almost 47K original tweets. In the next chart you will see how he has been using his official account @realDonaldTrump since then. If we take a look at Trump’s account since 2009, the year he opened his account, until there is data the evolution is quite interesting (kind of crazy if you think about it):

Donald Trump opened his Twitter account in 2009. He really started tweeting heavily in 2012.

Donald Trump has always used his personal Twitter account @realDonaldTrump instead of the one from the official for the US Presidency @Potus. Former President Barack Obama used to have a team running his accounts. Whenever he sent a tweet personally, he added its signature to it so the audience would know. Trump tweets today are considered a great source of information. We have to say that this analysis is based on real Trump tweets, they are not fake or made up, those are tweets sent by Trump himself.

You can get these tweets and complete data with a Twitter Historical report. The Tweet Binder report about how Donald Trump tweets in 2020 also shows that this tweet remains as Tump’s most liked tweet and Trump’s most retweeted tweet he ever shared:

Interesting facts about Donald Trump in Twitter

• How many Twitter followers  Donald Trump had? Trump’s Twitter account had over 77 million followers
• How many mentions did Trump receive in Twitter? He used to get 10,000 mentions in 20 minutes. Can you imagine his phone?
• Is there one fake Donald Trump in Twitter? Ummm, one? Not just one, thousands!
• Trump only followed around 50 people and mostly his companies and his family (Ivanka Trump or Donald Trump Jr.).
• CNN Trump tweets were not very “nice”.
• How much was a tweet from Donald Trump worth? The market value will was almost 115K USD. However, since Donald Trump’s tweets got tons of engagement, its real value was over 5K USD. Amazing.

Tweet Binder Twego tweets economic value

Former President Trump liked Twitter. Twitter is the place where Donald Trump feet safe, independent and where he can say whatever he wants. We haven’t tried to judge the content of the tweets. Donald Trump’s use of Twitter was very peculiar because he is used it everyday and each of his tweets used to generate a huge controversy. In fact, the way he addresses the media was not been seen before, he insults and make fun of them. That could be one of the reasons why Twitter banned Trump’s Twitter account for good.

Let’s compare the value of the Former USA President with an ex-President: Barack Obama. A tweet from Barack Obama is worth over the triple than a tweet from Trump:

This is the value of one tweet from Barack Obama.

Trump’s most retweeted and liked tweet

The most retweeted tweet by Donald Trump was the one where he announced he had Covid-19 (October 2020):

In 2017 Donald Trump sent his second most retweeted tweet. The tweet where he showed a video making fun of CNN News is the one with the highest number of retweets and likes. It reached 324,000 retweets and 529,000 likes. Tweets sent by Trump about the CNN were not quite delicate.

The third one was from November 2016 and we already shared it before (a few lines above) where he said that “Today we make America great again”. This tweets had 302,432 retweets and 491K likes.

We also investigated the tweets sent to TO Donald Trump with the highest number of mentions. It belongs to Jimmy Kimmel and it was sent in 2017 (March. 23rd and got almost 500K retweets)

Hillary

#20 word of all time (#200 in the last 3 months; #168 in the last 1 month)

The number of @realDonaldTrump’s tweets mentioning “Hillary” over time

Understandably, Hillary is nowhere as popular with Trump on Twitter today as she was a few years back. Here’s the president’s first ever tweet mentioning Clinton:

The biggest spike in the “Hillary” tweets happened around the presidential election in 2016, when Hillary became “crooked”. (If you were wondering: “crooked” is Trump’s #101 most tweeted word of all time).

These days, Trump only remembers Hillary occasionally, and “crooked” is sinking into oblivion with only one mention over the past month. 

While these word clouds are nowhere as elaborate as Awario’s will be (the latter will include 2- and 3-word phrases along with individual words), I hope you still found the analysis interesting (either way, do let me know in the comments).

Got ideas on whose tweets — or tweets mentioning what — you’d like to see analyzed next on this blog? Please share below!

Media and Trump’s tweets

We can say there is a bit of “love” between Fox News and Trump, they were the most mentioned news network in his tweets. We can also point out that Donald Trump liked to talk about the media, most of the most mentioned users were media channels, that’s a fact. 2% of Donald Trump tweets were about Fox News. And also, 519 tweets (7% of the total) talked about Fake News.

In the next table you can see a distribution of the mentioned Twitter account by Donald Trump:

Fox News was the media that received the highest number of mentions. It was also one of the only ones that used to talk “nice” about Donald Trump. However, it seems something changed:

Let’s remember that the one who sent these tweets was the then President of the United States of America.

Great

#1 word of all time (#1 in the last 3 months; #3 in the last 1 month)

The number of @realDonaldTrump’s tweets mentioning “great” over time

Donald Trump often tweets about how great something is. In fact, “great” is Trump’s most used word ever. And if you’re thinking about the “make America great again” motto, that’s not it: look how relatively small the word “America” is compared to “great” in the word clouds.

So what’s so great then?

There’s no one answer. Jobs numbers are great. Senators are great. Some Congressmen are. The police, the troops, and the military are great. North Korea’s economic potential is great. The Wall is (obviously). It’s just the president’s fav adjective, it seems.