The boffins have been busy. A team of UK data scientists, presumably fuelled by Fair Trade coffee and righteous indignation, has crunched the numbers on Donald Trump’s social media output. Their conclusion?
The man is a master of media manipulation, a puppeteer pulling the strings of a global audience with every hyperbolic post. And this is surprising to whom, exactly? We have watched, for the better part of a decade, as a former reality television star turned the highest office in the land into a perpetual episode of Candid Camera.
The study, from the University of Sheffield, claims that Trump’s posts follow a predictable pattern: early morning attacks to set the news cycle, midday distractions to bury stories, and late-night grievances to energise his base. This is not manipulation. This is the basic playbook of any tabloid editor from the Victorian era.
W.T. Stead would be proud.
The real manipulation, my dear readers, is the belief that we, the audience, are passive victims. We consume, we react, we share. We are complicit.
The data merely confirms what the historian already knew: that the demagogue thrives in a culture of intellectual decadence. We have traded substance for spectacle, and now we act shocked when the spectacle has a method. The Fall of Rome had its bread and circuses.
We have Twitter and cable news. The patterns are different. The outcome, I suspect, will be the same.
