Who is the Trolliest Troll? Hillary or The Donald?

Ah, the days when trolls only squatted under a bridge, patiently waiting for billy goats to clop, clop over its weathered, wooden planks. Sure, those billy goats had to muster up guile and cunning to get across the bridge, but this is nothing when compared to the skills required to vanquish the trolls who slyly, boldly?—?and continually?—?cast out their lines of insult and mockery in sleek 140 characters or less.

Yes, Twitter is the landscape where the prevailing trolls lurk, including the two major contenders to slip into Barack Obama’s solidly shiny shoes come November 8th, 2016?—?Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump.

To troll is to provoke, it is the schoolyard taunt all grown up and muscular. It is arguable that the American presidential election should be hard fought without the candidates trolling each other on Twitter, but the reality is that trolling has morphed into a political skill, one that may find itself on the future resumes of fresh-faced political campaign staffers.

But here I focus on who is the better troll, Clinton or Trump, and not how American elections should maybe… just maybe … be a little more serious.

Let’s begin with a look at style?—?at comfort with the medium, before delving deeper in our quest to crown one of these presidential candidates the trolliest troll ever.

TROLLIN’ TRUMP

The Donald is a natural troll: He thinks in insults and he thinks in short sentences. When you read one of his tweets, you read it in his voice?—?it is as if Trump with his orangey-red skin and petulant facial expressions rises from his Twitter feed to read his Tweets aloud to you, like some kind of deranged but alluring hologram.

And Trump is funny, which makes for prolific tweets.

HESITANT HILLARY

Hillary is not the natural Twitter troll that Trump is, as he bangs out tweets that are meant to elbow her off her path, to violently disrupt her game: She no doubt wishes that she could throw a hefty policy brief at his head and be done with it.

Even Obama joked about Hillary’s lack of social media prowess at the 2016 White House Correspondents’ Association dinner: “Dear America, did you get my poke? Is it appearing on your wall? I’m not sure I’m using this right. Love, Aunt Hillary.”

Hillary’s tweets about Trump usually try to make a substantive point about why he should not be president: Her usual style is to be plainspoken and to tell us something that she thinks we should know. Hillary’s ease with the medium of Twitter is not comparable to Trump’s; he is one with it.

But there is more to successful trolling than natural ability. Hillary’s campaign has on at least two occasions, been sublimely effective in trolling The Donald.

Remember when Trump took to Twitter to taunt Clinton about Obama’s official endorsement of her and Hillary tweeted “Delete your account”?

Within one hour 130,000 people had re-tweeted the popular Twitter-burn.

Trump quickly shot back with this: “How long did it take your staff of 823 people to think that up, and where are your 33,000 emails that you deleted?”?—?He is better at this, but Clinton won the battle, with the tweet going on to become her most popular of the campaign thus far.

The second sublime happening was what will no doubt become a textbook case on how to use the Internet machine to troll a political adversary while adding to your already impressive database of supporters. It went down like this:

According to Jenna Lowenstein, Clinton’s digital director, a young graphic designer for the Clinton campaign scrawled “Fat Pig” over an image of her face, as a way of stealing back one of Trump’s various insults toward women and giving it hilarity, all while making him seem ridiculous.

That the campaign’s digital team did not just drink in the moment, smack their lips, and move on, but moved to create Trump Yourself speaks to their agility. Type “Trump Yourself” and you will find yourself on Hillary’s website, able to choose among many joyfully comical filters of Trump’s insults to layer over your face?—?and send out into cyberspace.

Two million people Trumped themselves in one day, choosing filters like: “Total lightweight. Sad!”; “Major loser. Zero credibility.” and “Get the baby out of here.”

Try it! Trump Yourself.

The Hillary campaign gathers information about the people, likely her supporters, who Trump themselves and rolls on happily while Trump simmers with annoyance?—?which means that he is more likely to make, well let’s kindly call them…verbal mistakes.

The Trump campaign has not developed anything as clever as the Trump Yourself filters?—?yet. But perhaps they do not need to, Trump’s agility with Twitter, his evolved ability to torment, to focus on a perceived weakness in an opponent and then consistently beat the drum of that weakness, is wickedly effective.

Trump out-Tweets Clinton by a massive margin: At the time of writing this article, Trump had posted 33.2 thousand tweets to Clinton’s 7,934.

Trump has 11.4 million followers on Twitter, to Clinton’s respectable 8.71 million.

What do the numbers tell us?

Fortune magazine recently published a piece written by John A. Quelch and Thales Teixeira that lays out an argument for Trump investing big-time in advertising: They point out that he has earned about 2 billion of free media by being his controversial self, mainly on Twitter. This is a number that tells us that The Donald is the trolliest troll: He stirs things up. Big Time. 100%.

As a case in point, Trump has been tweeting about his erstwhile pals on Morning Joe, in this vein:

Yikes.

If you are still not convinced that Trump is a more effective troll than Clinton, I give you Nate Silver. The statistician who, it has been said “…has trouble falling asleep, because he already knows how many sheep there are” and the brains behind FiveThirtyEight, where a daily prediction of who will be the next American president lets some of us sleep better at night. (At the time of typing this sentence, The Donald has a 29.9% chance of moving into the White House.)

Nate Silver has declared that Trump is not only a better troll than Clinton, but that he is king of all of the trolls?—?Donald Trump is the World’s Greatest Troll.

Silver also tells us the truth about how to slay an outsized troll: You have to stop feeding it.

But what do you think? Who do you think is the biggest troll and why? Thank you for like, sharing and commenting below.

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