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Analyzing Trump’s Tweets
A Data-Based Analysis of Trump’s Language on Twitter
President Donald Trump represents a lot of firsts. For my money, the most important of these, the one that will change politics for years to come, is his use of social media.
Never before has a sitting president been on Twitter¹. In generations past, it was difficult to figure out what the most powerful person in the world was thinking. We had to rely on press secretaries or political speeches. Now, these thoughts trickle out in a constant stream for all to see. A leader with a constant communication channel to the world is unprecedented. Even Roosevelt’s fireside chats were limited to about 3 a year.
With Donald Trump’s tweets, we have a LARGE corpus of text data² that can give us insights into the man’s mind. Below I analyze all of Trump’s (over 24,000) tweets. Let’s see what patterns emerge.
Simple Language
Reading Trump’s tweets, the first thing that jumps out is how simple his use of language is. If we run his tweets through the Hemingway app to analyze their complexity, we find that they average about a 5th-grade reading level.
Mind you, simple words are effective. Most marketing materials are written so that they can be understood by 6th graders³. If we look at the most…
