About Playing Politics

Playing Politics: Media Platforms, Making Worlds is an NWO‑funded research project at Leiden University that ran between 2021 and 2025 (Grant number: 406.20.CW.005). It explored how social media platforms have transformed political communication and participation, emphasizing the interplay between politics and play. Drawing on media studies, play theory, law, and political philosophy, the research developed frameworks for understanding “ludo‑political” practices, including trolling, meme circulation, strategic humour, and other forms of digital political engagement.

About the repository

This repository is part of the broader Playing Politics project. It specifically investigates Donald Trump’s social media output and the responses it inspired, including memes and visual culture. By tracing how his expressions circulated, were adapted, and remixed across platforms, the repository illustrates the project’s aim of documenting how political language and digital media interact to produce contemporary political worlds.

Archiving and preserving social media interactions

Archiving and preserving tweets – and social media interactions more broadly – is essential for understanding how political communication unfolds in a networked public sphere. Social media posts, especially those from high-profile figures such as heads of state, function as both official statements and informal signals, shaping public discourse, media cycles, and policy interpretation.

Unlike traditional records, tweets are ephemeral; they can be deleted, leaving gaps in the historical and evidentiary record. Systematic preservation ensures that these messages remain available for scholarly analysis, journalistic accountability, and democratic transparency. By treating tweets as presidential records, archivists and researchers acknowledge their role as consequential instruments of governance and public influence, deserving of the same level of documentation and scrutiny as more conventional forms of political communication.

Defining Trumpisms

Trumpisms are distinctive rhetorical patterns and linguistic formulas characteristic of Donald Trump’s public discourse. As the New York Times describes them, these are “linguistic coinages of President Trump” that have “become ingrained in our collective vocabulary.” However, as scholars have noted, Trumpisms function primarily as a stylistic phenomenon rather than as lexical innovations. Their cultural impact derives not from introducing new vocabulary, but from Trump’s deployment of familiar language in highly memorable, reproducible forms – a communicative style that transforms ordinary words into viral templates.

These patterns manifest across several categories:

• Epithets and compounds: Branded labels that fuse evaluation with identity (e.g., “Crooked Hillary,” “Fake News”)
• Superlative-driven evaluation: Extreme adjectives used for emphasis (“tremendous,” “disaster,” “the best,” “total loser”)
• Formulaic templates: Reusable syntactic structures that invite remixing and appropriation (e.g., “many such cases,” “the likes of which the world has never seen”)
• Slogans and rallying cries: Short, imperative phrases designed for collective repetition (e.g., “Make America Great Again,” “Drain the Swamp”)
• Syntactic idiosyncrasies: Distinctive grammatical patterns including repetition for emphasis, sentence fragments, and self-interruption

Sources

Peeters, S., & Hagen, S. (2022). The 4CAT Capture and Analysis Toolkit: A Modular Tool for Transparent and Traceable Social Media Research. Computational Communication Research, 4(2), 571–589.

Simms, K. (2018). One year of Trump: Linguistics expert analyses US President’s influence on language. University of Liverpool. https://news.liverpool.ac.uk/2018/01/19/one-year-trump-linguistics-expert-analyses-us-presidents-influence-language/