“Welcome to the race, Sleepy Joe”: Donald Trump’s strategic use of name-calling on social media

Abstract

[Abstract] This dissertation explores Donald’s Trump strategic use of name-calling on social media, with a particular focus on Twitter and Truth Social during U.S presidential election years. The aim of this project is to demonstrate that Trump’s practice or referring to his political rivals with nicknames is not random or impulsive, but systematic, calculated, and tied to campaign timelines in each of his three presidential campaigns (2016, 2020 and 2024). The analysis uses the Donald Trump Twitter and Truth Social accounts (@real- DonaldTrump) as a corpus. Two tools have been used to make the searches in the corpus, Trump Twitter Archive and Factbase, which greatly facilitated the process of collecting data. The three campaign years are analysed using the same methodology: first, a quantitative part which analyses the frequency of use of each nickname over the respective campaign, and later a qualitative analysis. After analysing more than 27000 posts, separated into three different timespans (2016, 2020 and 2024), this study identifies different recurrent patterns in relationship with the use of derogatory nicknames such as “sleepy Joe” or “crooked Hillary”. Results indicate that Trump’s use of the nicknames tends to intensify the months closer to the elections with repeated patterns which suggest a strategic use.