Words that Matter: Donald Trump’s Twitter Communication in the Pre-COVID-19 Period

The goal of this study was to test the result presented by Stolee and Caton (2018) that former President of the United States Donald Trump primarily addressed his devoted electorate via Twitter. In the empirical setup, we referred to the theoretical concepts of a politician’s base and of an ‘echo chamber’ and the theories of populist leaders’ communication. The regression techniques were applied to determine the relationship between the popularity, measured as the number of “favorites” and “retweets”, and the frequency of words representing 16 topics. The topics connected to Trump’s self-praise, critique of opponents, the issue of immigration, and dealings with rival countries increased the popularity of the tweets. Surprisingly, tweets including the topics connected to crucial issues for the American public did not attract much interest. These results are in line with the theory of Stolee and Caton and may indicate that followers were not interested in the substantive content of the President’s posts. The results also confirm our hypothesis that while Trump’s message had a populist character, he primarily addressed his devoted electorate, not the wider audience.