What is Donald Trump as a Brand? Public Opinion on the 45th US President and His Second Impeachment in American Social Media Discussions

Abstract

This work is dedicated to analysis of an opinion expression as a basic category when studying online deliberative practices. The author investigates (1) what opinion people do express on D. Trump and his second impeachment in the discussions on Facebook pages of politically polarized American media outlets; (2) how people characterize D. Trump as a brand in these Facebook discussions. The empirical material is online discussions on D. Trump and his second impeachment conducted on the pages of four American media outlets distributed by political affiliation to parties: conservative Washington Times and Fox News; liberal New York Times and MSNBC. To achieve research objectives, systemic content analysis on opinion expression is used. The paper concludes that (1) the more negative attitude to D. Trump and more support for his second impeachment are expressed in the discussions on Facebook pages of liberal media rather than conservative media. In political online conversations, Donald Trump as a brand (2) is predominately described by the following categories: in toilet/trashed; liar/cheater; traitor; destroyed; loser; mentally ill/sociopath; toast; domestic terrorist; dead; narcissistic; toxic.