![]() In 2006, just after the launch of YouTube, Virginia Senator George Allen was sunk in large part by his “macaca” gaffe, which was caught on videotape by a tracker for his opponent and cast him as a bonkers xenophobe. Recorded missteps were trimmed to gotcha perfection that masqueraded as windows into a candidate’s sick soul. Remember “gaffes”? A phenomenon of early YouTube, they became a consequential microgenre of video that could kill a politician. The errors and outbursts that Trump cultivates would have been the stuff of nightmares for politicians of “Yes We Can” vintage. If Obama found in YouTube a place to executive-produce himself, Trump through Twitter has a stage on which to play himself. Over the course of this campaign, Trump’s enthusiastic Twitter following-now at 7.5 million and counting-has cherished this return to the coarser politics of the pre-Internet world, before the web came and made public figures armored, diffident and scared of their shadows. They add to the impression that he is unscripted, which is precisely what the Internet, and the American public, seems to be craving in this current media moment. In 2016, that appears to be a good thing. He embraces odd abbreviations, erratic capitalization and typos in his invariably reactive rants: “ illegal imm,” “ Presidential Primaries,” “ He is do totally biased.” is the opposite of aloof, the opposite of polished. Trump, who once claimed he had been called “the best 140 character writer in the world,” makes himself heard in fragments, monosyllables and exclamation points, a proud male hysteric with the deafening staccato and hair-trigger immune system that Twitter exists to host. ![]() No surprise: The platform works especially well for anyone who’s convinced they’ve been silenced elsewhere, including those in the midst of losing their minds (think Amanda Bynes, Rupert Murdoch, Curt Schilling) or finding their voices ( Marc Andreessen, Mia Farrow, John Podhoretz). With its sheen of raw improv and generous tolerance for subliteracy, Twitter has become Trump’s natural home. He would enchant the press while remaining decidedly unavailable, a style he has stuck with ever since, closing himself off for these past eight years in a White House operating system that makes Apple’s look transparent.īy contrast, Donald Trump, the crowned social-media virtuoso of the 2016 campaign cycle, is floridly available, grabbing the Internet’s lapels every few hours. Obama’s instruction to the media was as clear then as it would be throughout his presidency: Don’t come too close. In both, Obama spoke to the camera imperiously, behind multiple mics, resembling no one so much as Ronald Reagan cupping his ear precisely to not-hear reporters. And of course, the speech became even more famous in will.i.am’s highly aestheticized version of it, rousingly scored and populated by marquee musicians and actors. These shots modeled the proper reaction to the speech as surely as any sitcom laugh track. Obama’s stirring “Yes We Can” speech in New Hampshire found an audience not as documentary news but in a tightly storyboarded film uploaded by the campaign-complete with sentimental cutaways showing rapt supporters. Respectful cameras showed Obama extreme deference, in large part because they were on his payroll. In fact, the videos made a theme of the presidential candidate’s aloofness. ![]() ![]() Presumably, he meant to reach primary voters in a populist new medium. In 2007, Senator Barack Obama took to YouTube. Virginia Heffernan is author of the forthcoming Magic and Loss: The Internet as Art. ![]()
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