Daily chartThe origin of the specious

ONE wonders what must have been going through Donald Trump’s mind. On the morning of July 2nd, the president tweeted a cartoonish video showing himself wrestling a man with a CNN logo for a head to the ground and pummelling him. “#FraudNewsCNN #FNN” he captioned, in case the message were not clear enough. Mr Trump, a septuagenarian not widely known for his technical skills, almost certainly did not make the video himself. A user on Reddit, a social-discussion website, going by the moniker of “HanAssholeSolo” swiftly took credit.

The mysterious user’s post appeared on a devotional subreddit, a separated forum of sorts, called “The Donald”. Few corners of the internet are fouler. Its 440,000 members spew conspiracy theories, Islamophobia and anti-Semitism (though the forum’s moderators do at least try to stamp out the latter). With the world’s attention suddenly fixed on HanAssholeSolo, he (if it is a he) unsuccessfully tried to sanitise his history. Reporters found that, before the American president’s tweet, Mr AssholeSolo had published many truly repulsive comments, such as “500,000 dead Muslims is a good start.” 

The Economist has downloaded and trudged through 1.5m posts made in the forum since January 1st, 2016. The subreddit’s popularity has tracked the president’s. At the start of 2016, when Mr Trump’s chances of capturing the White House still seemed far-fetched, “The Donald” was attracting 40 posts a day and 300 comments. In the past month, the daily average has ballooned to 3,300 posts, which have in turn attracted a daily mean of 33,000 comments. In the same span, subscribers have increased 150 times over.

The president, known to be fond of adulation, could find plenty of it here. Some users refer to him as “God emperor”, a phrase that appears more than 6,000 times in post titles. The forum’s current main image features Mr Trump in revolutionary-era garb, with a bald eagle perched on one arm and a chain gun clutched in the other.

The forum became obsessed with ferreting out “fake news” after the president began tweeting about the topic. There were 500 posts mentioning “fake news” on January 11th, 2017, the day after Mr Trump declared “FAKE NEWS — A TOTAL POLITICAL WITCH HUNT!” on Twitter. 

Users on “The Donald” have a vocabulary of their own. The most commonly used words are obvious ones like “Trump” (315,000 mentions) and “Hillary” (115,000), but others are more surprising. “Centipedes” (“pedes” for short), a nickname for fellow Trump enthusiasts, gets 26,100 mentions. Pepe, a cartoon frog popular with the alt-right, is mentioned 13,000 times. Also popular are variations on the word “cuck” (some 28,000 mentions), a shortened form of “cuckservative”. (This word is a portmanteau of “cuckold” and “conservative”, and is a derogatory term for a conservative who has sold out to the left. The implication is that such people are weak and emasculated.) Some 10,000 posts have been devoted to Seth Rich, a Democratic Party staffer killed in a botched robbery, who alt-right conspiracists have suggested without evidence was connected to the leak of emails pilfered from the Democratic National Committee.

Such people are now providing the raw material for a president’s tweets. Happy birthday, America.