Okay folks, short-term lurker here! I found this sub when looking for an antidote to the delusional screech that is our pals over at r/The_Donald. I'm consistently blown away by the amount of work people do here in fact-checking and undermining Trump's positions, it's fantastic.

But I'm posting to try and start a discussion about what I think is one of, if not THE most effective weapon in Trump's arsenal - the @realDonaldTrump Twitter feed.

In the unlikely event you're reading this and you're COMPLETELY unfamiliar with Twitter - here's the key takeaway. @realDonaldTrump is completely bizarre. I'm not sure if it's Donald himself writing the tweets or whether it's the most sophisticated, high functioning bot known to man, but either way it is not the Twitter account of a regular politician. Regular politician's accounts are, to put it bluntly, fucking boring. They tweet things like this and this

It's pretty obvious that they have little interest in having control over their accounts and they become just another part in the campaign machine. I honestly think Trump has been the first person to truly, effectively weaponize social media. His tweets more closely resemble the mad, late night rants of a keyboard warrior 16 year old than a serious presidential candidate. He's personal. He makes outrageous claims that can go unchallenged because you can just ignore anyone you disagree with on Twitter. He uses @realDonaldTrump as a battering ram to heap abuse on his rivals, hype up the core base, and you know what? It's working. It's incredibly effective - just look at how often you see newspaper articles and opinion pieces derive their material from a Trump tweet.

So in this (potentially overlong) post, I'm going to rattle through some of the most common tactics Trump uses on Twitter and hopefully start a discussion in the comments.

1. REPETITION

Repetition, repetition, repetition. I made this one number 1 on the list because so many of the other tactics fall into the repetition banner in some shape or form. The most recent example from this week is Trump hammering home the message that Bernie Sanders is a weak shell of a sellout.

This tweet, this other tweet, and this one and several more over the past few days have had exactly the same message but just dressed up in different enough Trump-speak that it kind of feels different.

We all know that old meme - that if you repeat something enough times then people will start to believe it as a fact. Trump repeats lots of things in his Twitter feed that can only in the very loosest sense be regarded as facts, such as:

• "Hillary killed jobs!"
• Dishonest media!
• Any variation of tough/smart.

2. NAME CALLING

This is a tactic that again falls very nicely into the above - but it's worked so well for Trump that it's become one of his Twitter "Greatest Hits", I'm almost sure his fans are in utter rapture whenever he comes up with a new punchy title for a rival.

Most importantly, it's SO damn effective because it makes Trump's rivals seem more like Looney-Tunes esque cartoon villains rather than serious opponents, and thus if he can create a caricature of them he doesn't even need to attack policy.

• "Crooked Hillary" is the best example of this working better than anyone could have imagined - and Trump knows it. He's tweeted the phrase 47 times in the past MONTH alone - which amounts to an average of just under twice a day. The repetition isn't quite as manic as you might think - but plenty to make Hillary synonymous with being a crook in many people's eyes.

Some of his other greatest hits include * Lyin' Ted Cruz * Low-Energy Jeb * Goofy Elizabeth Warren * Little Marco * Perhaps more insidiously - he's started referring to Elizabeth Warren as "Pochahontas" due to her (I think) Native American heritage. Even if this isn't outright racism - it's pretty nasty and the nickname actually moves into our next point about how Trump can create his own reality on Twitter.

link to advanced search for "pocahontas"

You see the constant recurring meme of "Elizabeth Warren, sometimes referred to as Pocahontas?" - as if this is a widely used nickname. It's not. Only among Trump supporters. If you look at the bottom Trump actually tweeted the Pocahontas thing way back in 2014. At the top he fully changes into using the name "Pocahontas bombed last night!"

3. REALITY DISTORTION

The main objective of the @realDonaldTrump account, I'm sure, is to galvanize the core base, to make them truly believe that there is no chance that Donald can lose in November and that general opinion of Trump in the US is firmly in the red zone. To do this, he has to "distort reality" and here are a few examples of the ways he achieves this.

• Treats mildly favorable poll numbers as if they were actual election results, often posting inane "Thank you America!!" commentary along with them. Example

• Straight up telling easily refutable, flat-out lies because he knows nobody will bother looking at the 2000 other tweets calling him out on it. Best example is him very blatantly misrepresenting Scotland's reaction to Brexit

• Personifying large and complex entities (look at the amount of times Trump will crudely personify an entire state, for instance "The state of Florida was embarrassed!"), he likes to do this with ISIS in particular, saying they will be "drooling" and "laughing" at Clinton's election. The image is powerful and works really really well if your view of world politics is really really simple.

• Trump's bizarre online behaviour in general is almost a kind of meta-way of making the whole thing seem like a big joke - making potential consequences of his election seem less worrisome to people. Infantile, idiotic statements like "The Republican Party will be the most pro-Israel party of all time!!" (from July 14th), frequent capital letter bursts of "DISHONEST!", "JOBS!", "BAD JUDGEMENT", and whatever this utter abomination of a tweet is supposed to be. It feels like many of Trump's followers get the impression they're in on the joke somehow, like all the aforementioned stuff really does amount to his "greatest hits" somewhat.

I'm tired now, and this has maybe been a long shitpost but I feel if we can draw some attention on to one of Trump's most effective weapons, we can start to undermine it somehow. This is especially important given that Clinton's social media and online presence are utterly dire.

Thanks for reading folks, looking forward to more insights in the comments!