Cartoons, Insults, and Bible Quotes: 54 Tweets Donald Trump Has Liked

By Sam ReismanJan 29th, 2016, 5:20 pm
 

donald-trumpDonald Trump knows how to use Twitter.

He has expertly harnessed the social media platform to amplify his message and harness the zealous enthusiasm of his fans. The 140-character limit lends itself to his succinct and uncomplicated style of assessing people’s worth (“loser”) and clarifying his policy positions (“we will win”). In particular, he has made effective use of the retweet functionality, broadcasting comments, insights, and memes from his fan base, taking offerings from individual fans and sharing them with the whole Trump crew. Retweets have an additional advantage: When these tidbits turn out to be doctored, spurious, or dubiously sourced, the retweet arrangement allows him to backpedal every time. He didn’t write it, after all.

But there’s one function on Twitter that The Donald has not made much use of. In the nearly seven years that he has been using Twitter, he has apparently only “liked” 59 tweets — 54 of which are from publicly-viewable accounts

Recently our own J.D. Durkin noted that Trump only follows 49 people on Twitter, a paltry number considering his eminence in the political-media landscape. Given that Trump has made such scant and selective use of both the “follow” and the “like” button, it can be revealing to take a look the few, gleaming examples that he has chosen to single out.

There isn’t much of an agreed-upon definition for the meaning of the Twitter like. It can indicate an endorsement that’s slightly less enthusiastic than a retweet, a way of signaling: “Yes, this is a good tweet, but it’s not RT-good.” It can also be a useful way of bookmarking tweets to make it easy to recover them from the bottomless timeline.

It is of course possible that Trump liked and un-liked any number of tweets over the years. It is also possible that Trump only recently liked some of these tweets, which are in some cases years old. But, as of Jan. 29, these are the tweets he has chosen to keep digitally laminated for posterity.

It may surprise nobody that of the 59 tweets Trump has liked, 6 were written by Donald Trump himself:

Some of his own liked tweets take the form of a hall of mirrors reflecting and re-reflecting Trump’s self-regard, as when he likes a tweet he wrote, in which he celebrates a fan for having created a humorous video ode to his speeches:

…or when he likes himself thanking a fan for, in turn, loving him:

Some of liked tweets make sense in the context of the time in which they were tweeted, as when he liked a link to a petition to stop the Iran deal last year when Tea Party groups were rallying against it:

…or the time just last week when he gave a thumbs-up to Sarah Palin as she was en route to Oklahoma to stump for him.

Some times he likes to commemorate a meeting:

…or enshrine a favorable poll:

He liked a fan who seemed to jump to his defense when a columnist was gearing up to write an unflattering piece:

He tips his hat when followers repeat his words:

…even if the words aren’t strictly speaking his:

Some of his likes seem to be humble nods to random followers who tweet encouraging and complimentary things:

But Trump has liked insults as well:

…including a decidedly unflattering short animation that depicts a vision of the inside of Trump’s head. The video features a bull evacuating massively into an apparatus that converts its feces into tweets that come out of Trump’s mouth:

In one case, Trump liked a tweet in which a follower apparently snapped a photo of himself and sent it to Trump:

Trump’s Christian faith has come under scrutiny, but he liked this tweet, which was originally posted March 1, 2013. The significance to Trump of this quote on that day is unclear.

He likes the musings of media personalities:

…though he has a particular fondness for Piers Morgan:

…and Bret Baier:

He likes tweets from or about members of his family:

He likes tweets that acknowledge his recent or upcoming appearances on TV:

…or even TV segments on which he apparently did not appear:

Sometimes he just likes it when he’s mentioned in the news:

He likes tweets that are related to his various projects and interests, such as his hotels, The Apprentice, and the Miss Universe contest:

He liked a tweet that was fundraising for golfer Ernie Els’s foundation to help people with autism:

As far back as 2012, he signaled the direction his eventual campaign would take, by liking a series of tweets that read now as familiar touchstones of his candidacy:

He likes tweets that allow him to express his dislike for Barack Obama:

…his antipathy for the Occupy movement:

…and his much-documented loathing of wind turbines:

Trump even liked a satirical bit from 2013, which made the connection between Trump’s birtherism and Ted Cruz. The link in the tweet is dead, but it is archived here. (It is possible that Trump only liked this years-old tweet recently, as he wasn’t making much noise about Cruz’s Canadian birth back in 2013.)

And then there’s this:

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Follow Sam Reisman on Twitter. He has liked 351 tweets.

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