Exactly a decade ago, when Donald Trump, a billionaire businessman and famous showman, officially announced his candidacy for the presidency of the United States, the world was divided between those incredulous who took the entry into politics of such a bizarre character lightly and those who tried to decipher the keys of a phenomenon that seemed unprecedented. His rude style, his bravado, his supposed extreme sincerity, his shameless lies, his arrogant tone, his disdain... "I could shoot someone on Fifth Avenue and not lose any votes," he boasted. He was not entirely wrong. Everything was fascinating and unbelievable at the same time, but not necessarily spontaneous.
It was then that a Dallas journalist named Rudolph Bush first pointed to the future President of the United States as "the king of all trolls."
"Trump's rhetoric is not so fresh or original," Bush warned at the time in The Dallas Morning News as if he were predicting the future from the pages of a horoscope. "His rhetoric can be seen every day of the week in the comments section of any article on politics. It is heard loud and clear in any anonymous person spending their days trolling on the internet. Trump is hostile, moralistic, insulting, flexible with the truth, indifferent to reason," his portrait said. "Challenge Trump on his ideas and he will attack us as human beings. He is a perfect troll."
Ten years later, here we are. Donald Trump occupies the throne of the White House for the second time, and his style is more unrestrained than ever. The recent scene during the heated reception to Volodimir Zelenski in Washington perfectly sums up the new landscape. A moment of global geopolitics turned into a sort of dramatic farce.
The cocky tone, the overacting and exaggeration, the falsehoods, the disdain, the insult, the harassment and bullying, the comebacks, the theatricality, the absurdity. A touch of comedy as well. All the elements that reigned not long ago in the darkest corners of the internet, the toxic atmosphere that was trending on Twitter until people grew tired of its stench, have escaped the digital sphere. "Trolling has burst the internet bubble and now governs the planet." Trump, "the king of all trolls," represents the empire of flesh-and-blood haters, the rise of the new trolligarchy.
"The emergence of trolls on social media was a harsh blow to democracy. Now that behavior has left the networks and has escalated to the most real aspect of American society: the White House."
This is the voice of communication advisor and political consultant Antoni Gutiérrez-Rubí, one of the first experts to predict the advent of what he called post-politics, that substitute for democracy in which reality influences public decisions less than thoughts and beliefs based on prejudices, obsessions, or falsehoods. "That plasticity to turn emotion into electoral action is the great novelty of this time. The shout, the disaffection, and the insult have become a new electoral and governmental format," he explains.
The strategy, according to Gutiérrez-Rubí, started as a nearly marginal and mostly anonymous tactic to destabilize debates in internet forums and social networks, but its effectiveness led to its expansion.
"Internet trolls, who emerged from the shallow swamps of online forums or from the parts of YouTube not yet dominated by Taylor Swift, have managed to reach surprising levels of notoriety," warned last year the Political Science professor at the University of Michigan, Matt McManus, in an article where he already elevated Trump as the troll in chief, the troll in chief of world politics. "He is largely a predictable symptom of our culture, a postmodern conservative who plays with the truth because he has discovered that his audience is more interested in being entertained than informed."
Before the arrival of a troll with a bouffant hairstyle in the United States Government, the virulent bubble of social media was already gigantic. "It slowly spread to attack and humiliate politicians who did not think like them, it became a strategy of harassment and demolition whose objective was to amplify polarization, erode the credibility of politics, and sow discord," points out Gutiérrez-Rubí. And anonymous anger gradually turned into harassment with names and surnames, led by those who wanted to make headlines, be a trend, gain followers, and shine in front of an increasingly connected and angry citizenry.
Spoiler: it worked. And the bubble burst right in our faces.
"For them, leadership itself is a joke. They are trolling each other. They are trolling us. They have turned mischief into a mandate."
"In a context of disaffection and discredit, those attacks, that provocative bravado, that way of humiliating opponents regardless of whether the accusation is true or not, has paid off," laments the Spanish political scientist. "On the one hand, it has managed to mobilize millions of activists. And on the other hand, it has brought to power those who used this strategy. Today, the entire Trump environment acts as trolls, behaves the same, attacks and humiliates, and seduces with this mode of communication a huge community of connected citizens who believe wholeheartedly in their leader," he explains.
In this muddy landscape, political leadership becomes a sort of "permanent performance," says Gutiérrez-Rubí, a reality show with uninterrupted broadcasting where the important thing is always to show an antagonistic identity against the "other," against the enemy, against those who do not think like them. "Emotion over reason."
If television once reshaped public discourse in its image, now something similar has happened with the impact of social media. "If TV turned politics into entertainment, then it could be said that social media turned it into a huge high school, full of popular kids, losers, and bullies," warned in 2017, during the early months of the first Trump in the White House, Jason Hannan, Communication professor at the University of Winnipeg and author of an almost prophetic essay published only in English that could be translated as Trolling Ourselves to Death: Democracy in the Era of Social Networks.
His work analyzed how the overwhelming success of Barack Obama on social media back in 2008 with the slogan Yes, we can ended up being "a curse" for progressive parties. "They arrogantly assumed that the future belonged to them, that social media was the terrain of a younger generation of liberal hipsters versed in irony, memes, and hashtags, while assuming that conservatives were largely a disoriented generation of elderly people with technological problems who could barely understand the exotic world of Facebook, Twitter, and Snapchat. They couldn't have been more wrong."
"Trolling has become widespread," proclaims Professor Hannan. "It is no longer limited to the darkest corners of the internet. The President of the United States is a troll. It is not an exaggeration to say that the American public discourse is being recreated before our eyes in the light of Twitter. The common denominator in all this white noise is the logic of insult: the one who insults most harshly wins."
"If television turned politics into entertainment, social media turned it into a huge high school, full of bullies."