Donald Trump may be very wealthy, but he certainly isn’t popular. So when the real estate mogul announced his intention to run for the 2016 American presidential elections, he was never going to have an easy time of it. The Republican candidate sent Twitter into a frenzy after making racist remarks about Mexican immigrants at his presidential announcement.

The scandal has followed him ever since, exposing him to very harsh criticism from the Mexican community and his opposition, as well as doing severe damage to his business interests. And yet the multi-millionaire continues to infuriate his critics and delight his fans by posting eye-wateringly politically incorrect statements and campaign news on Twitter.

At the time this article was written, the Trump Presidential campaign had generated 3,949,191 tweets since June 15th. Using the Visibrain Twitter monitoring platform we can look back on how the situation unfurled on Twitter.

A PR crisis that went from bad to worse

Donald Trump’s presidential campaign has been a real roller coaster ride so far. If we look at the Twitter stream timeline below, we can see that there were three main spikes in Twitter activity. Using the Focus feature, we can zoom in on these three periods and find out exactly what caused them.

If we focus on the first hour after the start of Donald Trump’s speech, we can obtain minute-by-minute results.

His Presidential announcement speech started at 11 am on Tuesday June 16th, and by 11.20 am Twitter was on fire. The speech generated 91,169 tweets in just one hour, going as high as 2,489 TPM (tweets per minute).

Initially, the speech gained the most tweets from neutral press coverage: we can see below that the top three tweets came from CNN Breaking News, Fox News, and BBC Breaking News.

However, it certainly didn’t take long for the first negative tweets to start coming in. If we zoom in on tweets posted at the start of Donald Trump’s speech at 11 am we can see that the first tweets commenting on his racist remarks were posted just nine minutes after his speech began.

The tweets continued to pour in over the course of the day, reaching a staggering 524,634 in just 24 hours. If we focus on the most retweeted posts of the day, the outcome isn’t positive. Of the top seven tweets (two of which are from Trump himself), three are overtly negative.

@mydaughtersarmy was the second most retweeted post of the day after Trump’s tweet announcing his presidential candidacy. His tweet draws attention to the fact that Trump had tweeted that China was stealing jobs from the Unites States…only to show in the photo below that the Donald Trump clothing line is made in China.

Dear Donald Trump, Twitter is forever. pic.twitter.com/y9KvWCuDF2

— My Daughter's Army (@mydaughtersarmy) May 19, 2015

All in all, things weren’t off to a good start.

Outrage from the Mexican community spurs companies to drop Trump

As if the damage done to his image wasn’t bad enough, Donald Trump’s business interests have also taken a severe hit from the crisis, and attracted international media attention.

Twitter activity around the Trump campaign gradually died down between June 16th and June 24th, but picked up again on June 25th when Univision Communications announced the end of its business relationship with the Miss Universe Organization, which is part-owned by Donald Trump. The corporation declared that it would no longer be airing the Miss USA pageant due to Trump’s recent racist remarks.

To fan the flames even further, Cristian de la Fuente, influential Mexican actor and presenter of Miss USA, also announced that he refused to be associated with any event with links to Trump and was stepping down. De la Fuente posted a video of himself explaining why he would no longer be presenting Miss USA. An article about De la Fuente from wwww.latinwe.com, De la Fuente’s video, and the public statement from Univision were the most retweeted links of the day.

This show of solidarity from Univision and Cristian de la Fuente, as well as other celebrities such as Ricky Martin, sparked a huge response from the Mexican and Hispanic community. They took to Twitter in their thousands to express their outrage at Trump’s comments.

The Visibrain platform shows us just how much the situation got Mexican and Hispanic communities tweeting: during the period of June 16th to June 24th, just 16% of tweets about Donald Trump were in Spanish. On June 25th, this percentage more than doubled, going up to 36%.

If we look at the top hashtags for that day, we can see that three of the top five most frequently used hashtags for that day were in defense of the Mexican community.

Anxious to avoid guilt by association, other brands rushed to separate themselves from Trump. On June 29th, NBC Universal severed ties with him, and department store chain Macy’s followed suit on July 1st.

If we look at top hashtags over this period, we can see that #yourefired is number 8 out of the top ten hashtags used in posts, appearing 3,347 times. “You’re fired” is of course the catchphrase used to ruthlessly eliminate candidates on “The Apprentice”, the cut-throat reality game show hosted by Trump himself.

To make more sense of this hashtag, we can use the Visibrain platform to filter on the 3,347 tweets that used it and look at their content.

Several of the top tweets use the hashtag to support NBC in their decision to cut ties with Donald Trump.

A surprising influencer

It wasn’t only the damage done to the Trump empire that caused a stir. Trump was also being crushed in a Twitter poll by another presidential candidate…an avocado. Yes, really.

On July 1st, @avocadofact tweeted a seemingly innocent (and very tongue-in-cheek) post:

who would you rather have in office? rt for an avocado. fav for donald trump. pic.twitter.com/aZBQ8uZWG0

— Avocado (@avocadofact) July 1, 2015

Twitter went wild, and rather embarrassingly for Mr. Trump, the avocado won by a landslide: at the time this post was written, the tweet had 75,544 retweets to just 7,483 favorites.

The fact that the tweet went viral in spite of @avocadofact only having 2,394 followers on the day it was posted shows that good-timing is everything.

Things really aren’t looking good for Trump so far, in fact, recent studies have shown that he is currently the most hated presidential candidate. But at least as far as Twitter is concerned, things weren’t all bad news for the Trump campaign.

Trump’s supporters stand by him on Twitter

Although Donald Trump has run into severe criticism from his politically incorrect statements, some find his outspokenness refreshing and honest, and he has a surprisingly large number of supporters. The top pro-Trump hashtags, #makeamericagreatagain, #donaldtrumpforpresident, and #wakeupamerica have been used 678,811 times since June 16th.

So who was supporting Trump the most? If we zoom in on users with the highest retweet counts who used one of the three top hashtags, we can see that he’s backed by some very committed and influential republicans.

After Trump was dropped by Macy’s department store, the #boycottmacys hashtag was used 5,810 times to encourage supporters to boycott the store.

Trump himself has been working hard to defend his ideas on Twitter. His official Twitter account has been extremely active since the start of his campaign: @realDonaldTrump tweeted 788 times between June 16th and July 9th. As well as his own tweets, the presidential candidate retweeted many positive messages from his supporters.

So how is Donald Trump doing on Twitter compared to other presidential candidates? Using the Visibrain platform’s Quick Trends feature, we can compare levels of Twitter activity around Donald Trump and other candidates such as Jeb Bush, Scott Walker, Mike Huckabee and Hillary Clinton.

We can see on the graph below that Donald Trump has the highest levels of tweets mentioning his name, although most probably for all of the wrong reasons.

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Donald Trump has certainly managed to attract a lot of attention over the last few weeks. As the battle for the presidency continues, we will no doubt be seeing a lot more of him in our Twitter feeds in the future…but we’ll go out on a limb here and say we probably won’t be seeing him in the White House.

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