You’ve got mail: how the Trump administration used legislative communication to frame his last year in office

Abstract

Legislative communication frames how constituents perceive politicians’ successes. However, most research on legislative communication focuses on Congressional or Senatorial email correspondence, without considering the importance of presidential emails or the way politicians frame their failures. Existing work on legislative communication also tends to analyze the documents in isolation, leaving open the opportunity to analyze the networked effect of information flows. To fill this gap, we analyze a year of 1600 Daily content–The Official White House email style newsletter created by the Obama Administration and subsequently adopted after the Trump administration took office. In doing so, we identify the central frames the Trump White House relied on leading up to the 2020 election and the media sources used to legitimize these claims. Drawing on frequency counts, structural topic modeling, and qualitative content analysis, our data reveal the important role electoral communication plays in framing current events and the extent to which email is an essential node in the right-wing media ecosystem.