Politics and Twitter: How Twitter Political Leaders responded to the raid of Mar-A-Lago

by: Tino Mataruka

On August 8th, 2022 former United States President Donald J. Trump’s home and hotel in The Mar-A-Lago Club in Palm Beach, Florida were raided in search of documents that were believed to be mishandled during Trump’s time in the White House. This was a major event and there is even speculation it could result in the former president having to forgo his desire to re-run for office in 2024 due to his alleged mishandling of government documents. This event has generated significant discourse on various social media sites, specifically Twitter. For this blog post I have examined both a conservative social media influencer and a liberal social media influencer with the hopes of comparing and contrasting their rampant tweets and the backlash or support that proceeded in their respective comment sections to analyze how legal opinion gets formed on social media after new stories come out.

Steven Crowder is a conservative social media influencer that has his own podcast called “Louder with Crowder”. When the news broke out about the search warrant issued against former president Trump, Crowder was extreme in his response and caused a good amount of response in his Twitter comment section. Throughout this section I will analyze a few of his tweets and the responses to them. In Crowder’s initial reaction to the Mar-A-Lago raid, he issued a series of tweets condemning the invasion of Trump’s home and concluded with the statement, “Tomorrow is war. Sleep well.”

This statement was a hyperbole used with the hopes of causing an uproar in response to the Mar-A-Lago raid that could have served to initiate a panic amongst Crowder’s followers or anyone who saw the tweet. Crowder then proceeded the next day to tweet statements such as, “This is one of the darkest days in regards to your personal freedoms,” and “This is one of those days that you’re going to tell your children and grandchildren about,” again engaging his audience in an over-exaggeration to the raid of the former president. This hyperbole can be compared to propaganda where one uses biased and sometimes misleading information to promote their own political beliefs and agendas. With Crowder having just under two million Twitter followers, everything that he posts will at least be seen by thousands of people and when one has the power to deliver a message to this many people it can be very dangerous. For example the capitol riots started off with Trump’s comments on the election and then spread to people on social media where the numbers of people set to storm Washington just continued to rise until the issue became a national security crisis. Something like that can be ignited by a single tweet like the ones that Crowder has put out. The response though to these tweets is a whole other issue in itself that starts in the battlegrounds of the Twitter comment section. 

Crowder’s ‘Darkest days’ tweet received 40.1k likes, 4.9k retweets, and 1.1k quote tweets as of September 13th. From going through Crowder’s tweets and scrolling through his comment sections, there is absolutely no shortage of discourse between Crowder supporters and non-supporters.

Surprisingly, the most liked comment of all these says, “My personal freedoms seem pretty chill not gonna lie”. With this being a tweet from Crowder’s page, you would think that the most liked comment would be one in favor of his opinion, but with this tweet it is in fact the opposite. All this does is speak volumes to how bold Crowder’s tweet was. More likely than not, someone who doesn’t follow Crowder or doesn’t agree with his opinions is not going to seek out his account to comment on it, but because of how Twitter pushes certain trending tweets out with its algorithm this person and others were able to see it and they believed the tweet was so outlandish that they had to storm into his comment section to try and disprove whatever he had said. Because Crowder attempted to disprove a national security issue with little evidence to support his claims, it was easy for people to combat him and it has gotten to the point where it’s not even a democratic vs republican issue, but rather one of Trump loyalists vs everyone else. The person who commented that they still have their personal freedoms could be conservative or liberal because not all conservatives are Trump supporters. From diving deeper into the comments, we just continue to see evidence of how subjective Twitter can be, with people hoping for attention through their public comments.

Adam Serwer is a liberal social media influencer who also serves as a staff writer for ‘The Athletic’. Following the raid of Mar-A-Lago, Serwer’s tweets completely differed from those of Steven Crowder, as we should expect from a democrat vs republican. While Crowder engaged in hyperbole by claiming that “Tomorrow is War”, Serwer mostly tweeted only in response to the tweets of others. Instead of taking a brash and what some would call an ‘unhinged’ approach to the way that he influences his audience, Serwer analyzes the matter at hand along with the reactions from others to then formulate his own opinion based upon the articles he has read and the people that he is influenced by. His approach is one that is more tactical and takes a substantial amount of research and knowledge of whatever case it is that he is commenting on which makes sense because of his role with ‘The Athletic’ and his journalist background. His approach can be seen as amore “boring” approach due to  the lack of bold statements seen in Crowder’s Tweets, but as it relates to Serwer’s supporters and audience, in general they tend to be much more receptive to his tweets than Crowder’s audience is to his. 

Twitter comment sections can get very heated, as evidenced by responses to Steven Crowder. Adam Serwer, however, seems to have plenty of support in his comment section for his stance on Trump’s Mar-A-Lago raid.

Now, it would be inaccurate to say that Serwer has a “better” fan base than Crowder based on the comment sections of one particular case, but it is interesting that not many opposing opinions were seen in Serwer’s comments. As I mentioned earlier, a simple explanation could be that Serwer’s tweets weren’t as unhinged, but it could also be due to the fact that Serwer has 1.6 million fewer followers than Crowder. For example, Serwer’s most liked tweet within 72 hours following the Mar-A-Lago raid received 12.5k likes where Crowder’s received over 40k. The discourse seen in Crowder’s comment section could be seen as a result of his popularity through performative outrage while the lack of discourse in Serwer’s tweets is because he is less emotional in his tweets and his reach isn’t broad enough to have non-supporters running to his comments to refute every tweet that he puts out.

The raid of Donald Trump’s Mar-A-Lago home and hotel is a very important issue that is still ongoing and could be for a while and depending on how the case is ruled the documents found in Trump’s home could jeopardize his chances of re-running for office in 2024. The reaction to this event by political social media leaders on Twitter served to influence and upset those that keep up with them. To dive deeper into the social media aspect of hot current events, I analyzed the tweets and comment sections of Steven Crowder and Adam Serwer. From this I learned that there are different ways to go about spreading information on social media, as Serwer seemed to go with a research based approach whileCrowder utilized a brash and unhinged approach. I also learned that discrepancies in follow count can have an impact on the amount of discourse with an influencer’s comment section as evidenced by the amount of discourse within Crowder’s comments. Because of today’s culture, many people look to these political influencers to then formulate their own opinions. This can be dangerous at times due to the lack of fact checking done by these influencers and, while their views may be objectively correct, all that it ever seems to do is divide the political parties within this nation rather than unify for the achievement of a whole nation.