On the eve of the Thanksgiving truce, Donald Trump rewarded the 67 million followers of his Twitter account with a bold photomontage. The President of the United States, his corpulence places on the threshold of obesity, released the muscular body of the actor Sylvester Stallone in the film Rocky III, topped with his own face. An allusion to the story of a health check he had done the day before, at a Florida campaign rally, in which the doctors had humorously invited him, according to him, to show his "Magnificent torso".
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A further transgression, for once a player, from a Donald Trump who, in three years presidency, transformed this social network into a real media, where the freedom of tone is total and where the president does not prohibit any excess. @realDonaldTrump asserts itself as an ancillary press service, vampirisant the executive power, polarizing the attention of foreign capitals.
To the point that, on August 23, the furious announcement of an increase in import taxes on goods from China, in the midst of a trade war between Washington and Beijing, was reproduced a few hours later in the form of a statement from the White House. Identical, capital letters synonymous with emphasis and punctuation included.
Take control of the information cycle
The use of this account is also more and more intensive. For the second consecutive month, Donald Trump will have published in November, more than eight hundred messages written or shared, four times more than when he arrived at the White House.
The large number of TV shows, mainly from the conservative Fox News, in which the president is praised, or his vilified opponents, explain much of it. And the frequency of intervention of the President should not decline with the continuation of the impeachment procedure that is the subject of the House of Representatives, and with the proximity of the presidential election of 2020.
Donald Trump quickly took the measure of the assets of this megaphone. It allows him at every moment to take control of the information cycle while escaping the heavy rhythm of the presidency, with recriminatory or satisfactory messages, published at dawn or late in the evening.
The echo provoked far exceeds this network, which is also frequented by a relative majority of people who define themselves as rather close to the Democratic camp, according to a Pew Research Center study published in 2018. Rightly or wrongly, the President of the States United States appears as a precursor, a source of inspiration for other heads of state or government followers of political disruption.
