Trump’s Undiplomatic Tweets, and the Response from Foreign Leaders

The final speaker in this ECREA 2018 session is Maja Šimunjak, who shifts our focus to the Twitter activities of Donald Trump in the early stages of his presidency, and to the responses these received from foreign leaders.

Trump mentioned some six leaders and 19 countries in the first months of his presidency, and this is considerable greater than the activity of many other national leaders; his mentions are often directed more at America’s (or Trump’s) perceived enemies than acknowledging its friends. Such mentions can then be analysed for their use of conventional diplomatic language (qualifying, hedging, polite, positive, and/or non-dramatic) – and his tweets mostly showed language in the non-dramatic register, or just went well past diplomatic conventions by using dramatic terms and extralingual markers. There was limited use of positive or polite language, and instead there is plenty of negative language even towards supposedly friendly nations.

Foreign leaders often responded in some form; Israeli PM Binyamin Netanyahu was especially fulsome in his tweeting at Trump, but received only one response for his 20+ tweets. Japan’s PM Shinzo Abe received seven tweets from Trump, and responded with one of his own (this from a leader who does not use Twitter much at all); this may be seen as an indication of the success of Abe’s charm offensive after Trump’s election. Other countries responded mainly by engaging somewhat with Trump, or completely ignoring his tweets; this was the case especially for the friendly countries that Trump attacked, as well as for countries considered unfriendly to the U.S. Countries that responded to Trump mainly used polite, diplomatic language, with the exception of Venezuela which responded in kind to Trump’s aggression.

Trumps use of Twitter disrupts the conventional norms of diplomatic communication, then, but for the time being this does not seem to have resulted in significant changes in the communication practices by other countries. This study examined only the first month of Trump’s presidency, however, and norms may have changed in the meantime.