Donald Trump might have claimed recently that he won’t tweet anymore if he becomes president. But seven years of his tweets—and particularly the campaign frenzy of the past several months—nonetheless offer a one-of-a-kind window into Trump’s brain.

We took the corpus of Trump tweets since the inception of his @realDonaldTrump account, and examined what’s distinctive about Trump’s Twitter behavior. After some filtering and data loss, this amounted to about 15,000 tweets. Some of our findings—including about some of Trump’s favorite and most distinctive words—appear in these graphics. But we wanted to parse the data further: Just how much attention has Trump received on Twitter as a candidate, we wondered? And what is linguistically distinctive about how he tweets and what he tweets about?


Trump, it turns out, has a really unusual way of talking about his opponents in the race and elsewhere. If “lying Ted” and “lightweight Jeb” sound familiar, it’s because nobody else uses language quite like Trump does. And whatever else his candidacy has accomplished, it shows that running for president is amazing for your Twitter presence: Although @realDonaldTrump’s following has grown predictably, his social-media influence has absolutely exploded.

Trump was a well-exposed person before the election, of course, but his popularity on Twitter has grown dramatically since he announced his presidential run. The first measure of that popularity is how many followers he has gotten. Back in August, Trump had more followers than any other presidential candidate except Hillary Clinton. But by late September, he had surpassed the Democratic frontrunner. In fact, since August 1, Trump has more than doubled his number of followers.



What’s even more striking is how Trump’s retweets and likes have taken off since he announced. Below we plot the average number of retweets and likes for Trump’s tweets per month, starting with the inception of his account in 2009.



Consider that in January 2015, the average number of retweets one of Trump’s tweets received was 79. But by January 2016, the retweet average had shot up to 2,201. So while @realDonaldTrump’s capacity to reach people directly—i.e., his number of followers—has “only” doubled, the dissemination of his average tweet increased by a factor of 28 over that time period.

(We note that all Twitter data about followers, retweets and likes must be consumed with a generous helping of salt, since it is easy to pump up numbers with fake Twitter accounts. At some future date, we intend to do an audit of how many followers each candidate has among actual voters.)

Linguistically, how do those tweets look different from other candidates’? Based on our analysis of Trump’s syntax and that of the other four remaining candidates, we found that Trump leans toward adjectives more than anyone except Bernie Sanders. But what’s truly distinctive is how he uses adjectives: He combines an adjective followed by someone’s name a stunning 10 times more than any other candidate. This is primarily because of his proclivity for using Twitter to launch personal attacks on specific individuals, like “lightweight” Megyn Kelly, “little” Marco Rubio, “low-energy” Jeb Bush, “dopey” Bill Kristol, etc.

Some examples, by now familiar to those who follow Trump:



Lightweight @JebBush is spending a fortune of special interest against me in SC. False advertising- desperate and sad! — Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) February 12, 2016





Little Marco Rubio is just another Washington D.C. politician that is all talk and no action. #RobotRubio pic.twitter.com/HJWJeoZn4o — Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) February 28, 2016

Trump doesn’t restrict his name calling style only to this pattern; he also frequently uses a proper noun combined with a verb, a determiner (“a,” “the,” “every,” etc.) and then an adjective, as in the following examples:

Marco Rubio is totally weak on illegal immigration & in favor of easy amnesty. A lightweight choker - bad for #USA! — Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) November 10, 2015

Marco Rubio is a total lightweight who I wouldn’t hire to run one of my smaller companies - a highly overrated politician! — Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) November 10, 2015

In order to provide a feel for his use of adjectives and how they connect to specific individuals we developed a network, where we connect select prominent individuals with the adjectives to which they appear proximate. (While this method generally works well, occasionally it provides a misleading when adjectives are combined. For example, “Joe is a great big liar” would show Joe connected to “great” and “liar.”) “Nasty,” for example, is reserved for Hillary Clinton, Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio, with Cruz being the primary target. “Weak,” on the other hand, is shared among Jeb Bush, Clinton, Carly Fiorina and Rubio. “Lightweight,” while aimed at multiple targets, was especially used against Rubio. Megyn Kelly and Jon Stewart are “overrated.” Pollster Frank Luntz is “wonderful” and “great” (alluding to some good numbers Luntz predicted for Trump), though our data do not contain some more recent feuds between the two. And finally, the biggest recipient of adjectives is Trump himself, who is associated with words such as “great,” “beautiful” and “successful.”

Trump is also distinctive in his use of pronouns (“I,” “you,” “he,” “she,” “we,” “us,” etc.). Trump uses pronouns in a very different way than the other candidates. “I” and “me” (as well as Trump’s own name) are used much more than other candidates. While @realDonaldTrump’s use of “we” is within the range of other candidates’, Trump hardly uses the pronoun “us”—a bit surprising for a presidential candidate who is expected to lead America to a “great” shared future. On the other hand, he tends to use “she” and “he” much more often than other candidates do. (Clinton, however, uses “she” more than Trump).

Finally, what window does Twitter offer on Trump’s view of the world? Interestingly, there was a dramatic change in what countries were the target of his tweets as he moved toward becoming a candidate. Up to 2014, one country dominated his Twitter feed: China, with an emphasis on the growing threat that country poses to the United States.



America's Olympic uniforms are manufactured in China. Burn the uniforms!#U.S.OlympicCommittee — Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) July 13, 2012

Scary--now China's Development Bank is looking to buy U.S. homes and developments https://t.co/Y50nOI5R They will own our country soon. — Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) June 26, 2012





China has copied our military's F-22 Raptor design https://t.co/Oqi65Leb We should offset their theft from our debt. — Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) June 11, 2012

Now China is threatening our allies who share defense pacts with us, the latest is the Philippines https://t.co/zOZKQvPY Very aggressive — Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) May 14, 2012



But since 2014, Trump’s tweets about China have dropped precipitously. Instead, his targets have been much more diverse, with Mexico getting the most attention, but also many tweets about Syria and a non-state actor, ISIS. The emphasis of the Tweets about Mexico has been about jobs, corruption, and the threat that immigrants from Mexico pose.

Mexican leaders and negotiators are much tougher and smarter than those of the U.S. Mexico is killing us on jobs and trade. WAKE UP! — Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) July 3, 2015

....likewise, billions of dollars gets brought into Mexico through the border. We get the killers, drugs & crime, they get the money! — Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) July 13, 2015

Mexico’s totally corrupt gov’t looks horrible with El Chapo’s escape—totally corrupt. U.S. paid them $3 billion. — Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) July 13, 2015

Word is that Ford Motor, because of my constant badgering at packed events, is going to cancel their deal to go to Mexico and stay in U.S. — Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) October 25, 2015

Here's how the numbers shake out:



It’s clear Trump’s Twitter feed offers him a tool for direct access to voters, who then amplify that access by retweeting him at remarkable rates. Trump’s use of Twitter is likely to be studied in future years by political strategists, but the data we have so far suggests there’s something sui generis about @realDonaldTrump that likely isn’t replicable. There may just be a remarkable coincidence in 2016 of man, medium and message.