Trump Tweets + Analysis = Art?
I created a word cloud from nearly a year Donald Trump's tweets in 2019, then forgot to blog about it. Here are the results with a five year retrospective.
Back in 2016, I created a website called TweetFreq.net. It would take any Twitter username, load up the last 3,200 tweets of that account, and output a frequency graph of how many tweets the account posted per day, along with a list of the most frequently used words in those tweets, and a word cloud image based on that list. The site had to be shut down in 2023 after Elon Musk acquired Twitter, renamed it X, and started charging $100/month for the APIs that were used by TweetFreq. Thanks Elon. However, I ran that analysis on Donald Trump’s @realdonaldtrump Twitter account in 2019, saved the images, and promptly forgot about them…until now!
First, let’s look at the frequency graph.
TweetFreq revealed that on days when a tweet was posted he averaged posting 10 tweets per day, with the maximum number of tweets per day being 34 in November 2018. Some of those may be from staffers of course, but anyone who has seen Trump’s Twitter timeline knows there is a deference in grammar and tone when it comes to Trump’s tweets — he clearly wrote or dictated almost all of them.
The word cloud is made up of the top 300 most frequently used words. The more often a word is used, the larger that word will be in the word cloud. What strikes me about the word cloud is similar it is to Trump’s speech today. Great is the largest word. Lots of references to himself in the third-person (president, Trump, @realDonaldTrump). Immigration, border, etc. Keep in mind that this covers 2018, the second year of Trump’s presidential term, when the Mueller special counsel investigation was in full swing, so collusion and witch show up. Even my home state of Ohio makes an appearance.
The only remaining question is: Does this word cloud qualify as art?