He is a criminal defendant, a businessman, and a politician. But for his most devoted followers, Donald Trump will always be Mr. President. Joe Biden, or just Joe, is the current President of the United States.
That’s the conclusion of research that delved deep into political ads on Facebook and Instagram and discovered a stark difference in how Americans refer to the two presidential candidates. Pro-Trump advertisements continue to refer to Trump as “President Trump” despite his departure from the White House three years ago.
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When it comes to indicating our political allegiances, language may be just as telling as a MAGA cap, serving as a simple yet subtle reminder of the bogus election claims that continue to resonate online, as well as the division that has grabbed our politics and split our country.
“Words matter,” said Jennifer Stromer-Galley, a Syracuse University professor who led the study. According to her, giving Trump the title of president is a way of saying, “We share your ideology and understand—nnudge nudge—that Donald Trump is the rightful president.”
Stromer-Galley’s analysis emphasizes this difference, finding that advertising referring to Trump as “President Trump” was right-leaning, whereas left-leaning ads referred to him simply as “Trump.” Stromer-Galley believes it demonstrates that those purchasing web ads understand their audience and have solved the formula for appealing to Trump supporters. She explained that by referring to him as “president,” the commercials communicate to the audience their alignment and the alleged rigging of the 2020 election.
Stromer-Galley examined more than 24,000 political ad buys on Instagram and Facebook made by 1,800 organizations between September 2023 and February 2023. Approximately 870 million people saw the advertisements, which cost $15 million in total. Syracuse’s ElectionGraph Project, in collaboration with the data science startup Neo4j, released the findings on Tuesday.
In the United States, the current White House occupant holds the title of president, and federal law refers to previous office holders as “former presidents.”
Despite this, Trump’s attorneys have used the honorific to refer to their client during his criminal hush-money trial in New York. “We will call him ‘President Trump’ out of respect for the office that he held,” lawyer Todd Blanche stated. Prosecutors have decided to refer to Trump as “the defendant.”
Americans have previously withheld honorifics from presidents they despised, as indicated by screams of “not my president!” from critics of Barack Obama, George W. Bush, and Donald Trump. However, the pattern among Trump supporters is different, according to University of Kansas professor Robert Rowland, who has spent decades tracking the language surrounding the president. For starters, previous protests were not based on fraudulent claims of vote manipulation.
“Trump fans feel mistreated and seek a defender.” Trump is their defender, and they want to show respect and loyalty,” said Rowland, who was not part of the study. “I thought we were quite divided when George W. Bush was in office, but we are even more split now. Sometimes you can sense the split even in the words we use.”
His ardent followers frequently refer to Trump as “the president”, elevating their admiration to supernatural proportions. Some platforms have fan groups with names, such as the roughly 5,000-member “Trump is My President” group on X.
“I call him President Trump, the best president in my lifetime,” wrote Mark Allan Oliver on X. Reached by phone, the retired Oklahoman told The Associated Press that he believes the media and the political establishment have unfairly targeted Trump, even though he does not trust all of Trump’s allegations of vote rigging.
“They’ve been after him since the day he descended the escalator. “I don’t think Trump is a saint, but I think his policies are good for this country,” Oliver remarked.
