Negative Sentiment on Social Media about Trump’s National Emergency
Posted by Ying Xiong
On February 14, 2019, President Trump declared a national emergency to get more federal budget for the border wall.
From February 14 to15, 624,000 tweets involved in the topic discussion on Twitter. The online debate reached a peak twice in the past two days: one was on February 14 at 4 pm, and the other was February 15 at 11 am. Overall, the sentiment of the topic is negative. 90% of tweets expressed their negative emotions on the national emergency.
For this topic, two celebrities were mentioned the most on the issue: Donald Trump and Ann Coulter. President Trump declared the emergency and received many comments on him. Many social media users also quoted Ann Coulter’s assessment of Trump’s Rose Garden fiasco, “The only national emergency is that the president is an idiot.”
Among all the hashtag in this topic, #faketrumpemergency was used the most frequently to express social media users’ negative emotions.
As for the on-topic influencers, news agencies, such as ABC news, CNN, Market Watch, Newsweek, The New York Times, New Yorkers, and Times, are still the top influencers. As for the individual influencers, Donald Trump, Anderson Cooper (American journalist), and Ben Shapiro (American commentator) are the top influencers. Anderson Cooper said, “We fought the Revolutionary War not to have King George or his successor, and this is the action of a king.” Ben Shapiro tweeted that, “Trump shouldn’t be declaring a national emergency. The best legal case he has is 10 USC 284, declaring parts of the border drug corridors.”
