Donald Trump is probably Twitter’s dream user. Lots of followers, lots of engagement, and lots of tweeting about #brands – particularly TV shows that he’s in the process of watching. Second-screen engagement! Twitter’s engagement team salivate.
Late on Saturday night, Trump took offence to a Saturday Night Live( SNL) sketch that made fun of his habit of tweeting off the cuff, so he tweeted off the cuff about it. He’s done this a few other times about SNL this year, and tweeted several times about the show when he was on it.
It struck us: Trump’s Twitter feed might give us a good sense of what he watches on television and how he feels about it. Sure, Trump’s tweets are largely performative, but, unlike most politicians, he’s often happy to dash off a critique without moderating his views.
We went back to the beginning of his campaign for the presidency and isolated tweets referring to things he was watching on TV. We excluded plugs for interviews and retweets of his fans.
In total, Trump has tweeted about shows he’s watching more than 250 times. Often, he tweets about the same show repeatedly; we counted only one tweet per show. And he tweets about no network more than Fox News.
Most of the time, you won't be surprised to learn, Trump is tweeting about his displeasure with what’s on his TV. With some regularity, he also tweets out praise for his surrogates, thanking CNN’s Kayleigh McEnany multiple times, for example.
By network, his attitudes about what he saw on Fox News were largely ambivalent.
He feels mostly negative about everyone else, except Fox Business, which he didn’t tweet about that much.
Why the ambivalence on Fox? We isolated the particular shows he was watching where we could, either because he mentioned it or a guest on the show, or simply by noting the time of the tweet and what was on at the same moment.
The shows he tweeted about the most were The Kelly File, Fox & Friends and The O’Reilly Factor – a ll Fox News shows. He mostly watches political news shows, but not exclusively.
The split on how he feels about those shows, though, is dramatic.
Trump’s views of Kelly File host Megyn Kelly are famously negative. Shows that have been generally more positive to him – Fox & Friends; Hannity and O’Reilly Factor– get more positive reviews. His praise for Don Lemon’s show on CNN mostly stems from his enthusiasm for surrogates that appeared on it.
Setting aside those retweets praising how great his SNL performance was, Trump has tweeted about the show three times since he began running for president. When he ain’t on it, he ain’t into it.
But he still watches. On at least eight occasions, Trump said he will no longer watch the show or network he’s watching. He said it twice about Kelly, four times about Morning Joe. This analysis excludes things like his tweet last week about burning the flag, which was apparently spurred by a report on Fox & Friends. Matching up every tweet with something he happened to be watching would be nearly impossible.
Besides, Twitter is much happier to have Trump identify what he’s watching by name. Much better for engagement. – Washington Post