No. of Recommendations: 14
I really wish our society was literate in media psychology because a lot of what’s happening right now on his social media posts would be instantly recognizable instead of endlessly debated.
What Trump is doing online with his Truth Social account isn't just cruel trolling. It's more than that. It's BEHAVIORAL CONDITIONING.
His posts are meant to TRAIN. Train people’s emotional responses. Train what feels normal. Train what feels permissible. Train what feels exciting. They say, you don’t have to be thoughtful. You don’t have to be accurate. You don’t have to be humane. You don’t even have to be consistent. You only have to be vicious in the right direction.
Media psychology teaches that repetition plus authority plus emotional arousal rewires perception. And that’s exactly what his feed does. It keeps his audience in a constant state of anger, contempt, and permissioned cruelty, which all short-circuits critical thinking and replaces it with reflex.
If people understood media psychology, they’d see that outrage is not a side effect of his communication strategy. No, it’s the product. High-arousal emotions like rage and disgust make people more suggestible, more loyal to in-groups, and more tolerant of norm violations. When you keep an audience emotionally flooded and exhausted, you don’t have to make sense. You just have to keep them ACTIVATED.
His feed is also doing desensitization work. The reason each post has to be more outrageous than the last isn’t because he’s “losing it.” It’s because once shock wears off, you have to ESCALATE to maintain engagement. That’s a basic principle of media effects. What once would have ended a political career now barely registers because the audience has been trained to tolerate and even crave transgression.
And maybe most importantly, media literacy would make clear that the chaos is strategic. Confusion is the point. When the public is exhausted, journalists chase outrage instead of patterns, and institutions hesitate out of fear of backlash, power consolidates quietly and all kind of policy bullshit can go down behind the scenes.
So, we need to stop asking whether Trump “means it,” whether he’s “serious,” whether he's trolling, or whether he’s “just saying what people think.” We need to ask the more dangerous question: What behavior is this training people to accept, and who benefits from that acceptance?
Stacy Patton
