{"id":102355,"date":"2016-07-25T13:37:12","date_gmt":"2016-07-25T21:37:12","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/?p=102355"},"modified":"2016-07-25T13:37:12","modified_gmt":"2016-07-25T21:37:12","slug":"a-revealing-look-into-donald-trumps-unofficial-internet-campaign","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/?p=102355","title":{"rendered":"A revealing look into Donald Trump\u2019s unofficial Internet campaign"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><A HREF=\"https:\/\/www.washingtonpost.com\/news\/the-intersect\/wp\/2016\/07\/18\/meet-the-9-people-helping-donald-trump-win-the-internet\/\">From Washington Post July 18, 2016<\/a>:<\/p>\n<p>At this time last year, Bill Mitchell had 149 Twitter followers and \u201cnothing particularly interesting to say.\u201d He is now, per a recent MIT Media Lab study, the single most influential private person tweeting about the campaigns.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cI feel like I\u2019m part of something historic,\u201d Mitchell said from his home in Charlotte, N.C., where he currently tweets about Trump an average of 73 times per day. \u201cI think historians will look back on this election in 30 or 40 years and see it as the moment when America stepped back from the brink. I\u2019m proud to be a part of that.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Mitchell, 56, has always been interested in politics: He describes himself as a \u201clifelong conservative\u201d who has gotten in yelling matches with TV news. But he was never moved to actually participate until Trump entered the Republican race last June.<\/p>\n<p>Mitchell liked the idea of a businessman as commander-in-chief. (He\u2019s personally worked in executive recruitment for the past 30 years.) He also saw a gap in mainstream Trump coverage: No one, Mitchell believed, was doing a particularly knockout job explaining complex concepts to the political newcomers who had embraced Trump. And while the \u201chighly paid punditry\u201d predicted Trump\u2019s downfall on the daily, Mitchell thought they had it wrong.<\/p>\n<p>So he started tweeting: news articles from his favorite sources (Breitbart, Gateway Pundit, Conservative Treehouse, DC Whispers and Truthfeed), pithy commentaries, bite-sized political analyses. During the height of the primary season, Mitchell\u2019s account saw 25,000 retweets per day and reached 60 million people per month.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>From Washington Post July 18, 2016: At this time last year, Bill Mitchell had 149 Twitter followers and \u201cnothing particularly interesting to say.\u201d He is now, per a recent MIT Media Lab study, the single most influential private person tweeting &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/?p=102355\">Continue reading <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[21791],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-102355","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-america"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/102355","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=102355"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/102355\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":102356,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/102355\/revisions\/102356"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=102355"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=102355"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=102355"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}