Rhetorical Reveling

The Twitter-Verse: A Microcosm of Post-Truth Public Rhetorics

       

        Shifting to the one of the primary mediums through which post-truth rhetoric is practiced, and the post-truth label is used paradoxically, Twitter has become an interesting microcosm, so to speak, of public rhetorics and post-truth rhetorics. Donald Trump, the first president to extensively use Twitter as a means of public discourse, has, to some extent, turned Twitter into a truly public forum for ideological and political rhetoric. Interestingly, one could argue that he has, intentionally or otherwise, deconstructed many of the hierarchies inherent to the nature of political rhetorics, allowing anyone to respond regardless of qualification; however, the question of whether or not Twitter actually encourages conversation is one worth considering. By its very nature and form, Twitter encourages concision, quick responses with little development (having character limits), and mass participation; however, Twitter doesn't encourage continued discursive participation, often being compared to an "echo chamber," in the same way that a conversation, or debate, would require. Therefore, Twitter isn’t suitable for the development arguments, but instead for the assertion of truth claims without much fear of interrogation, and for the polarizing audiences who aren’t conversing to come to some shared belief, but instead solidifying the dichotomous nature of political identities. Therefore, I argue no, the nature of Twitter as a forum of discourse doesn’t encourage actual conversation or debate. In other words, while Twitter levels the playing field by allowing all participants a voice within political public rhetorics, the ethos of individuals, like Donald Trump, continues to slip through, and the intellectual involvement required in conversation or debate isn’t necessary in the same way: making Twitter an effective tool for post-truth rhetoric. 

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Establishing Trump’s Rhetoric

        Donald Trump’s rhetoric, as it relates to the idea of post-truth and is exhibited on Twitter, is mostly of two kinds. The first is exemplified when the arguer’s position on an issue shifts over time, suggesting that they are either genuinely inconsistent on the issue or they are conveniently taking the side that benefits their aim. The second can be characterized as an ignorance or manipulation of fact, as exhibited through the slanted representation of different political polls and news media, that typically further polarizes both sides of a given issue and the political aisle.
        To start with the first, political shifts in one’s stance that conveniently favor one’s political ambitions/agenda, we have the following example wherein Trump’s stance on the electoral college shifts from against, shortly after it was announced that Barack Obama had won the 2012 election (Figure 1), to favorable in 2016, following his win (Figure 2).

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Intentionality aside, this contradiction in belief obfuscates its audience’s ability to trace the president’s capacity for honesty, and makes the work of arguing against his stance difficult because his claims are either grounded in inconsistent belief or they are related in no way to actual belief, and are made only for political reasons. 
       Trump, in these claims, if genuine (convenient and authentic belief are capable, and maybe necessarily so, of being one in the same) is deeply influenced by context, rather than principle or an absolutist sense of reality, and, consequently, his understanding of truth, as illustrated through his tweets, is necessarily connected to situation and subjective understandings of fact. Yair Neuman and Iris Tabak, in their “Inconsistency as an Interactional Problem: A Lesson From Political Rhetoric,” articulate a similar idea when writing “context, rather than being a mere background for interactions between people, provides an interpretative frame through which participants construct and reconstruct the meaning of their psychosocial realm through discourse” (266-267), which elucidates the way in which context has actual, rather than passive, agency over the way in which people think and create knowledge discursively. However, while this framing seems to render Trump passive, manipulated by context, his agency, within this hypothetical framing, lies in his refusal to engage discursively with understandings of truth that differ from his own, and are consequently inconvenient. While context deeply influences meaning, and consequently meaning-making, it is this discursive element that gives all maker’s of meaning agency over their own belief. This idea is further exhibited in Trump’s second style of rhetoric: manipulating or ignoring fact that renders discursive knowledge creation between opposing political aisle’s extremely difficult.
        Considering the second possibility I’ve offered, that Trump, rather than being genuinely inconsistent in belief, intentionally takes the convenient position on given issues to further his political agenda, then Trump’s claims are not truly concerned with some accordance to a sense of reality but for utility. This, like the previous, is deeply connected to context, but through an awareness of it to persuade and is, in this sense, very rhetorically aware and effective. Either way, Trump’s inconsistency calls into question the foundation and nature of his belief/opinion in a manner that ultimately polarizes and requires questioning of his intent or lack, thereof.
        Shifting to the second kind of rhetoric exhibited in Trump’s tweets, we have this example wherein Trump makes unsupported or slanted claims, borrowing limited evidence in the form of statistics, to make claims that are inherently inflammatory and inaccurate (Figure 3).

 

 

 

 

 

 

 
 

 

 

 

 

 

These claims, as the New York Times article “Fact-Checking Trump’s Claim That Google ‘Manipulated’ Millions of Votes for Clinton” by Linda Qiu suggests, are based on inaccurate interpretations of an article written by Robert Epstein, titled “A Method for Detecting Bias in Search Rankings, with Evidence of Systematic Bias Related to the 2016 Presidential Election,” that suggested Google Search may have influenced undecided voters to vote for Hillary Clinton: “ In an interview, Mr. Epstein took issue with Mr. Trump’s characterization of his work. ‘I’ve never said Google manipulated the 2016 elections,’ he said. ‘The range of numbers he listed in the tweet is also incorrect’” (Qiu). Furthermore, Epstein’s work “was not peer-reviewed or rigorously evaluated by other researchers,” and “based on the daily online searches of just 95 participants, 21 of whom were self-described undecided voters — a small sample size to extrapolate to millions of voters,”  which further delegitimizes Trump’s claims, and illustrates the lack of intellectual consideration, or concern for truth, that goes into the crafting his claims on Twitter.     
        Thinking about this lack of concern for truth, within the context of Trump’s Tweets, if one side of the argument is arguing for the sake of revealing truth, and the other is arguing to serve solely pragmatic means, then the ability to either create or share knowledge through persuasion or discourse isn’t possible: the intent to create or share knowledge has to be mutual. In both of these kinds of rhetoric, as I have illustrated them, Trump is relying almost entirely on ethos in a manner that is capable of rendering nearly all external sources of knowledge, besides that which he has defined as reliable, and is therefore supporting his political purpose, as inaccurate. In some sense, post-truth rhetoric, for those who support the post-truth rhetor, is one wherein the rhetor’s ethos has established them as a, or the, gatekeeper of truth.

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