Donald Trump has a real problem here

| 10:00 pm EDT April 16, 2020
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Just about everything is going wrong for Donald Trump that can go wrong for an incumbent. He’s behind in every swing state. His approval rating is dropping amid a worsening crisis that he has no idea how to turn around. The economy has collapsed on his watch. Americans are dying, and he comes across as increasingly uninterested.

But large chunks of the mainstream media think that “balanced” coverage means painting both sides as both being in the same amount of trouble at any given time, and as a result, the New York Times has now decided that Joe Biden is in trouble because he doesn’t have as many social media followers as Donald Trump does. Here’s the thing: the Times actually has it backwards.

Donald Trump has nearly fifteen times as many Twitter followers as Joe Biden. Yet on average, Trump’s tweets only get about twice as many likes as Biden’s tweets. This suggests that the vast majority of Trump’s Twitter followers are fake. These aren’t even bots who interact with his tweets in automated fashion. These are fake accounts that aren’t even artificially active, and thus serve Trump no purpose whatsoever, beyond phony bragging rights.

The reality is that Donald Trump has had the high profile of being President of the United States for three years, yet he only has roughly twice the Twitter reach of his Democratic challenger, who has only been the nominee for about a week. As Joe Biden’s social media voice gets elevated by virtue of being the Democratic nominee, Trump’s social media voice will likely stagnate. Trump is the one with the problem here. He relies so heavily on Twitter as a strategy, yet Biden could overtake him in terms of Twitter engagement as the election goes on.