Content Analysis of Donald Trump Tweets

I am no fan of Donald Trump who is bad news for the Republican Party (and US politics more generally) so I hesitate to give his candidacy any more attention. He is entertaining, however, and I thought I'd post this content analysis of his tweets below as a pedagogical example of how one goes about conducting content/discourse analysis, and in particular, gauging "tone" (something I also do for my own research on Congressional statements on the North Korean regime). 

Faith, Christsianity, and the Meaning of Christmas

Christians get bashed for being intolerant, closed-minded, and ignorant. Some of this is deserved by Christians who reflect the values of Christ poorly. But this Christmas season, it was refreshing to see news stories and editorials reflect on the beauty and centrality of the Christian faith and its importance in this broken world.

Michael Gerson's piece centered on German theologian and Nazi resistor Dietrich Bonhoeffer was at the heart of this message. Here's Gerson quoting Bonhoeffer:  "He [God] takes what is little and lowly and makes it marvelous. And that is the wonder of all wonders, that God loves the lowly. . . . He loves the lost, the neglected, the unseemly, the excluded, the weak and broken.”

Gerson then reminds us that amidst the oppression and violence:

In the Christian view, the door was swung open by the incarnation, by a God who somehow became a defenseless child, a refugee, a teacher of good, a victim of injustice, left alone, tired, in doubt, to face a humiliating death. A God who — strangely, paradoxically, mysteriously — at the end felt abandoned by God. A God on our side. 

“God wants to always be with us,” Bonhoeffer said, “wherever we may be — in our sin, in our suffering and death. We are no longer alone: God is with us. We are no longer homeless; a bit of the eternal home itself has moved unto us.”This, despite all our fears and doubts, is Christmas: a God secretly revealed as love.

This article set the tone for an editorial which repeated a frequent theme this Advent season connecting the Syrian migrant crisis to Christ's birth by reflecting on Jesus as a displaced person, his parents fleeing from Egypt upon King Herod's decree to kill all children under the age of  two. I quote the last section of the editorial here which ended in a verse from Matthew 25:35:

 But the word “Christian” is often misused in our times, in a way that implies some allegiance to a particular political party, economic doctrine or set of moral strictures that are not representative of large numbers of true Christians. (The media are often complicit in this confusion.) There is a broader concept of the term, one that is succinct, relevant and all but imperative in this season when we face a humanitarian crisis that tests our character and our compassion. It comes from the Gospel of Matthew and is stated as an ideal voiced by Jesus: “I was hungry and you gave me food.I was thirsty and you game me drink.I was a stranger and you welcomed me.”

Finally, last week's Washington Post featured a story headlines, "The quiet impact of President Obama’s Christian faith." Part of the article described Obama's thought process in drafting the eulogy of Rev. Clementa Pinckney following the mass shooting murder at Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, SC. The shooter, a white man, was welcomed by black church members to join their Bible study when an hour into the study he stood up and went on a shooting spree. As author Greg Jaffe writes, Obama observed that " the Charleston parishioners had demonstrated their faith when they welcomed the killer into their Bible study. The families of the dead had passed God’s test when they faced down despair and found the grace to forgive." In essence, the President wanted to set the response of Emanuel church members as an example for a polarized nation.  As Obama quoted, “There’s all this goodness and decency and common sense on the ground, and somehow it gets translated into rigid, dogmatic, often mean-spirited politics.”

I don't see President Obama always as a man of faith, so it was a refreshing to hear how he thinks and struggles to apply Christian teaching to his politics. The lesson here (particularly for Christians) is that even if we fundamentally disagree on principles and policy, there's a way to be civil in our discussion and at least attempt to understand the other's position.

Overall, I'm pleased to see a mainstream newspaper like the Washington Post publishing stories which address issues of faith and Christianity without resorting to simple caricatures of Christians.

ISIS and A New Strategy for Bases?

Richard Immerman, who sponsored a conference on US Bases and the Construction of Hegemony earlier this fall, sent us a link to this NY Times article about the Pentagon working to build a string of bases in Africa, Central Asia, and the Middle East to address the threat from ISIS and its affiliates. I'm not sure how new this strategy is since plans like these have been in the works since the Bush Administration. However, it appears that the threat of ISIS has given strategic planners renewed interest in coordinating base policies.