There has been a recent rise in the use of social media as a platform for political communication. President Donald Trump who is very influential, due in part to his celebrity status as well as his presidential position, has had the power to influence his millions of followers on twitter. For this research, I used a content analysis and comparative analysis approach on eight tweets made by President Donald Trump which targeted Mexican immigration, Maxine Waters, LeBron James, Don Lemon, the National Football League (NFL) national anthem protesters and Elizabeth Warren and three tweets made by Senator Ted Cruz which targeted Mexican immigration. I found that for Mexican immigration, twitter commenters on Trump’s tweets were more prone to agree with him, as opposed to Cruz’s tweets, where his commenters disagreed with him.

Emotion acts as a primer for our memory retention and encoding processes. In the 2016 election, we saw an increase in negative or hostile rhetoric from candidates. I argue this is due to the use of Twitter and the physical representation of engagement. This paper examines the effect of enthusiasm, anxiety, and hostility in response to political tweets. Tweets from Republican presidential candidates, Donald Trump, Ted Cruz, and Marco Rubio were analyzed for emotional response content to explore mean differences in retweets from the three emotions.