uʍop ǝpᴉsdn ƃɐlɟ ǝɥʇ ƃuᴉʎlɟ ǝɹɐ suɐɔᴉlqndǝɹ ¿ǝǝs noʎ uɐɔ ʎɐs ɥO
Plus: Why Trump's better suited to social video than text-based social media
Hello, in this issue we’ll look at…
Why Trump's better suited to social video than text-based social media
uʍop ǝpᴉsdn ƃɐlɟ ǝɥʇ ƃuᴉʎlɟ ǝɹɐ suɐɔᴉlqndǝɹ ¿ǝǝs noʎ uɐɔ ʎɐs ɥO
Is a font still a font if it doesn’t use any letters?
Scroll to the end to see: what’s different about political campaigns this year compared to recent years past. 💸
Why Trump's better suited to social video than text-based social media
Let’s get ready to rumble.
Former President Donald Trump joined TikTok and on Saturday he posted his first video on the app he once tried to ban. It was shot at an Ultimate Fighting Championship match in Newark, N.J., that he attended, because of course it was. In the 13-second clip, Trump is introduced by UFC CEO Dana White and shown entering the arena and taking selfies to the sound of Kid Rock’s “American Bad Ass.”
“That was a good walk-on, right?” Trump says.
Yes, yes it was.
Trump responded to his historic criminal conviction by going to a cage match, and he got the Fox News segment he was after: “34 felonies, 45 keeps moving” read a chyron. One segment included footage of jacked, shirtless men pledging their devotion to Trump — “It is a damn travesty what they’re doing to you,” middleweight Sean Strickland told Trump in a clip Jesse Waters aired on his show — as well as news about how Trump’s TikTok account is clobbering President Joe Biden’s.
Trump’s TikTok debut was not only on message but great for engagement. The video, still his only post on the platform, has more than 85 million views and more than 5 million likes. His account now has more than 5.5 million followers while the Biden campaign’s bidenhq account has just nearly 360,000 followers.
Trump’s Truth Social-first strategy has been bad for his reach, research shows. Instead of potentially persuading swing voters, he’s speaking almost exclusively to those already converted to the MAGA cause in a right-wing echo chamber. With TikTok, though, he’s reaching younger voters, but it’s still friendly territory. Pro-Trump content outnumbers pro-Biden content on the app two-to-one.
But what if Trump’s diminished text-based social media reach is actually good for him?
In 1960, Richard Nixon handled his presidential campaign’s TV ad strategy himself. Over the objections of his advisors, he filmed boring spots in which he stood at a desk and spoke about issues. Nixon lost that year, but when he returned to run again eight years later, he handed over his advertising strategy to the professionals.
War photographer and documentary filmmaker Eugene Jones produced Nixon’s 1968 ads, which mostly married still photos to audio of Nixon speaking platitudes. The result was ads that balanced his campaign message of law and order with an image that was warm and friendly, no easy task. Nixon didn’t have to appear on camera himself, and he ended up winning the election that year.
With Trump’s first TikTok, he’s doing something similar with his social media. His tweets were seen as a liability, and polls in the final years of his term consistently found that about seven in ten Americans believed he tweeted too much, while nearly half of respondents in a 2019 Politico-Morning Consult poll believed his tweets could cost him the election.
With TikTok, though, Trump doesn’t appear to be running his own account. Instead of all-caps diatribes that could turn voters off, the short-form video app can show videos edited to express the image and message Trump’s campaign hopes to convey, not unlike Nixon’s 1968 ads.
To put it another way, on Truth Social, Trump sounds whiny and unhinged. In his first video on TikTok, though, basking in the adoration of fans at a fight, he projects the image of a tough guy, a fighter.
uʍop ǝpᴉsdn ƃɐlɟ ǝɥʇ ƃuᴉʎlɟ ǝɹɐ suɐɔᴉlqndǝɹ ¿ǝǝs noʎ uɐɔ ʎɐs ɥO
Americans have used the upside-down U.S. flag as a symbol of protest before, but the way it’s being used by right-wing protesters today represents something unique.
Rather than a symbol of protest for a larger movement, it’s being used in service to a single man, and rather than isolated instances of its use, it’s an increasingly popular symbol that reaches all the way to the home of someone at the highest level of government.
After a jury found Trump guilty of 34 felony counts of falsifying business records last week, some Republicans aligned with him turned the U.S. flag upside down, including Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.), who posted an inverted flag illustration on X, and Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank, which temporarily flew an upside-down flag at its Washington, D.C., headquarters.
The U.S. flag code states, “The flag should never be displayed with the union down, except as a signal of dire distress in instances of extreme danger to life or property,” but Americans have long had their own interpretation of “dire distress.” An inverted flag was used to protest slavery at a July 4, 1854 rally held by the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society, and it’s been used to protest the Vietnam War in the 1960s and ‘70s and to protest mistreatment of Native Americans by the members of American Indian Movement.
In recent years, though, upside-down flags have been flown as a symbol of false claims that Trump lost the election through fraud and that his recent conviction was politically motivated.
Upside-down flags were flown during the Jan. 6, 2021 attack on the U.S. Capitol and the New York Times reported last month that a flag was flown upside down at the home of U.S. Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito in the days before President Joe Biden’s inauguration, violating norms that justices avoid even the appearance of bias.
There’s no doubt that many who fly the flag upside down since Trump’s 2020 loss are sincere about their belief that the U.S. is in distress, but they’re also misinformed.
Trump’s conviction was a state case and it wasn’t decided by Biden nor his administration, but by a jury his own team agreed to. And with just 88 instances of voter fraud linked to the 2020 election found in the Heritage Foundation’s own database of election fraud cases, it’s clear that their own data disputes the false claim that widespread fraud altered the outcome of the 2020 election.
(Rather than pages of examples of Democrats stuffing ballot boxes or whatever right-wing conspiracy theorists have been pushing, the Heritage Foundation’s database is replete with examples like Ralph Holloway Thurman, a registered Republican who voted once for himself and again disguised in a hat and sunglasses on behalf of his son, a registered Democrat; and Jay Ketch, a registered Republican who voted once in Florida and again by mail in his home state of Michigan; and Edward Snodgrass, a registered Republican who submitted an absentee ballot on behalf of his deceased father, according to the database. I can’t speak to these people’s motives, but one wonders about the role that being fed a steady diet of misinformation about Democratic voter fraud might have to do with it.)
When the U.S. Supreme Court in 1974 ordered then-President Richard Nixon to release White House tapes linking him to efforts to cover up the Watergate break-in done to help him win the election, Republicans didn’t turn the flag upside down. Instead, conservative Sen. Barry Goldwater (R-Ariz.) said, “this man must go.”
Fifty years later, after a jury found Trump guilty of falsifying business documents to cover up an affair to help him win an election, today’s MAGA Republicans (who I’d argue are half as conservative as Goldwater and less stubbornly principled too), said “never surrender” with a link to a fundraising landing page.
Is a font still a font if it doesn’t use any letters?
When is a font no longer a font?
Poly Mono, a new font made of shapes instead of letters, blurs that line. Like Wingdings, the dingbat font made of primitive emoji-like characters, Poly Mono isn’t actually designed for spelling anything out. Instead, the font’s characters are geometric squares, circles, lines, and other shapes that can be arranged into designs. The characters are monospaced, or all the same height and width, so they tile perfectly.
“If there are no letters, is it technically a font?” asks Andrew Bellamy, Poly Mono’s designer and creative director at Otherwhere Collective. “I don’t have a definitive answer, and that’s part of the point.”
The font’s 38 characters are still assigned to keyboard keys “and we interact with it in the same way,” Bellamy says. “You press a key and something comes up on screen, but with the new twist that you can keep pressing the same key to change the assigned shape.” Hitting a key twice changes a character’s color and position, the period, comma, and hyphen all freeze characters in place.
The font’s “letterforms” were inspired by the prints of Karel Martens, a Dutch graphic designer, as well as 8-bit video games (the keys for colons, semicolons, and quote marks bring up an 8-bit mustached man in overalls named Marten who bears a passing resemblance to a famous video game plumber; hitting those keys multiple times makes him run in place).
And while most fonts use ligatures, or special glyphs that combine two or more characters into one (like the side-by-side F and T in “after,”), Poly Mono explores what Bellamy calls “mega-ligatures” that connect as many as eight characters.
Bellamy says he anticipates people will use the free font for fun, but with his background in branding and visual identity design, he also thinks it highlights a potential for brands.
“Brands tend to want to own a single color or combination of two that are unique in their market,” like McDonald’s and Ikea, he says. But “this is getting to be increasingly difficult with the sheer volume of brands out there now,” not to mention the limited number of colors on the color wheel.
Poly Mono, though, shows “how a consistent combination of many colors can also be used to create a recognizable and compelling identity.”
Have you seen this?
A star is born. During Rep. John Rose’s (R-Tenn.) comments on the House floor Monday about Trump’s conviction, his son Guy made silly faces.
Democrats need all the help they can get in November. These techies are answering the call. DigiDems matches tech talent with Democratic races across the country. Amid industry layoffs and the return of Trump, applications are pouring in. [Fast Company]
How a drop in small-dollar donations is shaking up both parties. In a stark reversal from recent political history, both parties have seen a significant decline this election cycle in the small-dollar contributions they harvest via text and email, largely from rank-and-file voters of modest means. [NOTUS]
How Trump’s fundraising of his criminal conviction. In fundraising ads, emails, and messages running shortly after the jury’s verdict last week, Trump characterized the case as a witch hunt. [Yello]
History of political design
“It’s Good Being First” tee (2020). The slogan for the tee, for Delaware State Sen. Sarah McBride, is a play on the fact she’s the first transgender state senator in U.S. history as well as the fact that Delaware was the first state admitted to the Union.
A portion of this newsletter was first published in Fast Company.
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