Until Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump meet on a debate stage in September, most of the sniping between the two presidential candidates will likely come in 140 characters or less.
Trump and Clinton traded blows on Twitter this week in a manner unseen in presidential politics, but common among rank-and-file supporters on social media.
Twitter became Trump’s home turf in the GOP primary, but Clinton isn’t ready to cede such crucial political real estate to Trump.
En route to his party’s nomination, Trump used Twitter to build a following and amplify his profile. But it wasn’t always pretty. He promoted unflattering pictures of an opponent’s spouse, retweeted white supremacists, and misspelled words such as “honor” and “choker” in a full embrace of Twitter’s haphazard form. The @realDonaldTrump account became his primary means of communication with his voters, the place where he releases ads, comments on the news of the day, and celebrates his electoral successes.
Clinton’s twitter account, @HillaryClinton, appeared much more calculated, making her departure to challenge Trump on Twitter this week a moment that caught the Internet by storm.
When Trump swung at President Obama’s endorsement of Clinton this week, Clinton hit back.
“Delete your account,” Clinton tweeted, using snarky Internet slang that soon began trending on Twitter.
More than two hours later, Trump returned fire and tweeted, “How long did it take your staff of 823 people to think that up—and where are your 33,000 emails that you deleted?”
Clinton’s sparring match with Trump on Twitter may foreshadow a willingness for Clinton to attack Trump’s perceived strengths. Clinton will kick off next week with visits to two battleground states crucial to Trump’s electoral chances: Ohio and Pennsylvania. She also plans to campaign near Cleveland, the cite of this summer’s GOP convention.
Trump, who has referred to himself as the “Ernest Hemingway of a hundred and forty characters,” will likely respond on Twitter to Clinton’s advances as part of an effort to crowd her out of the conversation. During a two-month period measured last fall by the New York Times, Trump was mentioned more than three times as often as Clinton, nearly four times as much as socialist Sen. Bernie Sanders, and eight times as much as Republican rivals such as Florida Sen. Marco Rubio and Ben Carson.
Trump’s Twitter insults also get covered as major news events on cable television and canvass news organizations online. The Sunlight Foundation, a nonprofit organization aimed at making government more transparent, has even published a thorough examination of the tweets Trump deletes.
The self-professed billionaire’s mastery of Twitter has allowed him to bypass some forms of old-fashioned retail politicking and offset his lack of one-on-one voter interaction necessitated by his large rallies. But Clinton’s retort to Trump on Thursday proved to be her most retweeted tweet ever.
Retweets may not be endorsements or votes, but it is an indicator of who is setting the conversation for any particular day on the campaign trail. Whether any candidate will emerge with the upper hand remains to be seen.
