WASHINGTON — He is a criminal defendant, a businessman and a politician. But to his most loyal supporters, Donald Trump will always be Mr. President. As for the man currently serving in the White House, they’re calling him Biden, or maybe just Joe.
That’s the conclusion of research that looked at political ads on Facebook and Instagram and found a sharp divide in how Americans refer to the two contenders for the White House. In pro-Trump ads, Trump is still “President Trump,” even though he left the White House three years ago.
When it comes to expressing our political allegiance, language can be as telling as a MAGA hat, providing a simple and subtle reminder of the false election claims that continue to reverberate online, as well as the polarization that has gripped our politics and divides our divisions. people.
“Words matter,” said Jennifer Stromer-Galley, a professor at Syracuse University who led the study. Giving Trump the title of president, she said, is a way to signal that “we share your ideology and we understand — nudge nudge — that Donald Trump is the rightful president.”
Stromer-Galley’s analysis underlines that division, finding that the ads referring to Trump as “President Trump” lean right, while the left-leaning ads are more likely to refer to him simply as “Trump.” To Stromer-Galley, this shows that the people buying online ads know their audience and have cracked the code on how to appeal to Trump’s supporters. By calling him “president,” the ads tell the viewer they are on the same side, she said, and that they agree the 2020 election was rigged.
Stromer-Galley analyzed more than 24,000 political ad purchases on Instagram and Facebook placed by 1,800 organizations between September 2023 and February. In total, the ads cost $15 million and were shown almost 870 million times. The findings were published Tuesday by Syracuse’s ElectionGraph Project through a partnership with data science company Neo4j.
In the United States, the title of president is reserved for the current occupant of the White House, and federal law uses the term “former president” to refer to previous officeholders.
Despite this, Trump’s own lawyers have used the honorific to refer to their client in his criminal hush-money trial in New York. “We will call him ‘President Trump’ out of respect for the office he held,” said attorney Todd Blanche. Prosecutors have chosen to refer to Trump as “the defendant.”
Americans have withheld honorable mentions from presidents they disliked in the past, evidenced by cries of “not my president!” from critics of Barack Obama, George W. Bush and Trump. But the trend among Trump supporters is different, according to University of Kansas professor Robert Rowland, who has tracked the rhetoric surrounding the presidency for decades. First, those past protests were not based on false allegations of election fraud.
“Trump supporters feel disrespected and are looking for someone to be their defender. Trump is their defender and they want to show respect and loyalty,” said Rowland, who was not involved in the investigation. “I thought we were incredibly divided when George W. Bush was in power, but now we’re even more divided. Sometimes you even see that division in the words we use.”
Trump is regularly referred to as “the president” by loyal supporters, some of whom have taken their praise to godlike levels. Fan clubs on some platforms have names, such as a “Trump is My President” group on X that has nearly 5,000 members.
“I call him President Trump, the best president of my life,” wrote Mark Allan Oliver on believes that Trump has been unfairly persecuted by the media and political establishment.
‘They’ve been after him since the day he came off the escalator. I don’t think Trump is a saint, but I think his policies are great for this country,” Oliver said.