Trump's social media style isn't a hit with the general public

Kathy FrankovicConsultant
December 01, 2017, 3:00 PM GMT+0

37% of Americans think the President echoes what he thinks people want to hear

President Trump continues to use Twitter as a means of announcing policy, celebrating holidays and – most notably – attacking his opponents. It’s a practice that many in the latest Economist/YouGov Poll find troublesome. Fewer than one in four Americans find his Twitter behavior appropriate for a President, while six in ten do not.

Republican support for the President’s tweets has continued throughout the Trump Presidency, though it has moved up and down with the nature of those tweets. But there is a significant gender gap among Republicans. Now, Republican women are just as likely to say that the President’s use of Twitter is inappropriate as to think it is appropriate. The gender gap is also present among Democrats and Independents, but it is not as large.

Negative feelings about the President’s tweeting pattern usually increase when he uses Twitter to attack. Last week, he engaged in a Twitter war with the father of one of basketball players who had been arrested in China about credit he should receive. In the YouGov Tweetindex, two of those tweets rank among the ten lowest-rated ten tweets of the more than 1,700 tweets it has asked the public to evaluate since February 4. Only the tweets attacking Mark Cuban, Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski, former FBI Director James Comey, and Arnold Schwarzenegger were disliked more.

[The poll ended Monday, November 27, and missed any evaluation of tweets after that date.]

But the President gets fairly high marks on authenticity. More think he says what he really believes than think he is just saying what he thinks people want to hear. 81% of Republicans and even 29% of Democrats agree.

Read the full results and tables here.

Image: Getty

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