What happens when ordinary people end up in Trump's tweets

A firefighter. A retired librarian. A technology researcher who happens to be named Ivanka. These are a few people who've discovered what happens when you end up in Trump's tweets. Photo / Getty

The evening of April 29 passed like many others for Ben Rawls, a fire lieutenant in Tuscaloosa: settled in the rocking chair on his porch, amid empty beer cans and mosquito-fighting candles, tweeting to an audience of dozens until he got sleepy.

"Granted I am in Alabama," Rawls, 45, wrote around 11pm, after a major firefighters union endorsed Joe Biden for president, "but most of the firefighters I talk to are voting @realDonaldTrump."

The morning of May 1, some 36 hours later, was less typical.

Rawls showered and took his daughters to school. He ignored his phone, until it yapped so insistently that he had to look. An ashbin of Twitter comments greeted him: Racist. Moron. "'Toothless' — that was a good one," he recalled.

The most curious posts disputed Rawls' very existence. Strangers accused him of being a bot. He replied to one with a video he recorded in his pickup. "Here I am," he said to the camera. "No faking here."

All told, it took about 12 hours for him to solve the mystery. Back in his rocking chair, he stared at a fellow Twitter user's note of congratulations: Rawls had been retweeted by the president of the United States.

Along with the Republican allies, Fox News hosts and conspiracy-mongering trolls whose messages President Donald Trump pinballs across the political arena, he has also elevated regular people whose words he finds pleasing. Perhaps no group understands the praise-seeking cyclone that is @realDonaldTrump better than these arbitrary few who have lived inside it, briefly and usually unwittingly.

Their brushes with cybercelebrity are a portal into the Twitter feedback loop powered and experienced by Trump — dark, caustic, skimpy on nuance — where the ripples of a single presidential tweet can be hard to fathom unless measured against the relative anonymity to which these users were accustomed. Rawls got 2,700 retweets and 14,000 "likes" with the boost from Trump. The reach of his tweets before and since, he estimated, was approximately zero.

For many of the retweeted, the temporary platform stands as a testament to a style of politics they have never seen before — one that has bonded the president to his followers, virtual or otherwise.

"No other president has ever done stuff like this," said Curtis Vincent, a 35-year old in Bowling Green, Kentucky, who operates one of the more than 215 unverified accounts Trump has retweeted since taking office. "They've been on a higher pedestal."

Rawls, Vincent and several others were retweeted by Trump on May 1 after responding to a post by a Fox News personality, Dan Bongino, about the fire union's endorsing Biden.

Joining them in temporary Twitter fame was Joelle Palombo, 46, a Southern California resident with 11 followers, who had largely used her account to cheer on her daughter's soccer team. But after Bongino tweeted that "NONE of the firemen" he knew were with Biden, she replied with a note of support for Trump from one "fire family" out West.

The flood of reactions so spooked Palombo that she enlisted her teenage son to help block anyone she saw in her feed. The purge took three days, she said, and included the president, who she did not realise had retweeted her until a reporter told her months later.

"I went and looked at his account, and I blocked him," Palombo said of Trump. "That's how scared I was. I'm just one tiny hair on a dog. Are you kidding me?"

Although her affection for the president persists, Palombo questions the value of his favoured medium. "How many hours of the day do people put in to do this?" she said. "I don't need to have a voice on this. I'll vote."

Ben Rawls outside of his home. Photo / Wes Frazer, The New York Times

Others have found more purpose in the practice. Rawls described himself as a reluctant Trump voter in 2016. He preferred Ted Cruz during the Republican primary, and he winces at some of the president's choices, including insulting John McCain well after the senator's death.

But as the 2020 election approaches, Rawls suggests, the president's Twitter output is a more effective galvaniser than even the slickest campaign ad. "The tweeting doesn't bother me so much anymore," he said. "I don't really feel like I wasted a vote."

And the validation of the president's retweet has encouraged his own more quarrelsome instincts. "Before all this happened, I would type something out and say, 'People will think I'm crazy,'" he recalled, citing prospective tweets that he scrapped.

Since May, these second thoughts have been rarer. He has called Anthony Scaramucci, the former White House communications director, a "bitter jerk." He has shared a doctored video of Speaker Nancy Pelosi appearing to slur her words. He has weaponised a gif of Judge Judy ("Either you are playing dumb, or it's not an act") to mock Rep. Eric Swalwell, a California Democrat promoting gun control.

"I'm a little bit less of a wallflower than I used to be," Rawls said, crediting Trump's retweet. "I guess you could say I was more emboldened."

Catching his eye

Capital letters help. Sentence structure can be disregarded. Mornings, East Coast time, are best.

Grabbing Trump's attention on Twitter is more art than science — and, often, more fluke than art. But some who have been retweeted say there are certain flourishes that can improve the odds.

The surest path is echoing Trump's voice. The user @fiiibuster, whose profile boasts that he has been retweeted twice by the president, has built a following of more than 38,000 accounts — and won the digital stamp of approval from a man with 66 million — through a steady offering of posts that resemble Trump's own. Among the words in @fiiibuster's retweeted messages: "security," "prosperity," "America first," "Pathetic," "bad reporter," "shame!"

In other cases, Trump has gravitated toward those who share his taste in reading. A few weeks ago, he retweeted Cathy Buffaloe, 70, a retired librarian in Walton County, Georgia, after she quoted a Wall Street Journal column criticising Representative Adam Schiff, the Democratic chairman of the House Intelligence Committee.

President Donald Trump has exploited social media like no other American president. Photo / Al Drago, The New York Times

When she told her husband what had happened, he asked if she had simply dreamed it. She took screenshots to show to friends and gained about 200 followers. "It isn't often that 'regular' people have an opportunity to be heard concerning national issues," Buffaloe said in an email.

J.T. Lewis, a 19-year-old Republican candidate for the Connecticut state Senate whose brother Jesse was killed in the Sandy Hook massacre in 2012, was retweeted last year after writing a flattering message to Trump. When he traveled to Washington months later to meet with the president as part of a school safety event, Lewis brought a printout of the tweet.

"He smirked and signed it," he said. "It's in my room somewhere."

Lewis said he hoped the president's imprimatur would show that Trump was not in league with the conspiracy theorist Alex Jones, who has spread bogus claims about the Sandy Hook shooting, including asserting that the victims' families were actors and part of a plot to confiscate guns. (In 2015, Trump appeared on Jones' "Infowars" program and praised him.)

But Lewis is skeptical that getting through to Trump owes to any elaborate strategy. "I don't think things are planned out the way we think they are from the outside," he said. "I think that was literally just: Guy in pyjamas, 'Oh, this is a nice tweet.'"

The wrong Ivanka

"The fingers aren't as good as the brain," the president once explained, discussing the typos he makes on Twitter.

And those fingers have at times conferred a spotlight on unsuspecting tweeters with low opinions of him.

In a tweet one night in January 2017, just before his inauguration, Trump shared a message calling his daughter Ivanka "a woman with real character and class" and tagging @ivanka.

That Twitter handle belongs to Ivanka Majic, 45, a technology researcher in Brighton, England, who shares a first name and little else with the president's daughter. Majic woke up to media inquiries and a dilemma.

"There's a decision to be made," she said in an interview. "If you're going to say something, what are you going to say?"

Majic recognised she would probably never be handed a megaphone like this again. "He was a bit unlucky, really, that it was my Twitter account," she said.

She settled on this: "You're a man with great responsibilities. May I suggest more care on Twitter and more time learning about #climatechange."

Instantly, Majic became something of a local luminary as her progressive city strained to process Trump's victory. Days later, at the London chapter of the global Women's March, one attendee's sign read, "@Ivanka, loving your work!"

In the years since, Majic has celebrated an annual "Trumpiversary" to mark the occasion. But one news clipping from the time still grates.

"There was one article that said, 'Ivanka only has 2,700 followers,'" she remembered. "I was like, 'That's quite good for a normal person!'"

Written by: Matt Flegenheimer

Photographs by: Josh Haner, Al Drago and Wes Frazer

© 2019 THE NEW YORK TIMES