How Reddit Is Talking About The Trump Presidency

Sep 22, 2017

Every new presidency brings its own language to America, a set of names, acronyms and slang that work their way into the zeitgeist. The Bush era had 9/11, WMDs, freedom fries and misunderestimated, while Obama’s tenure included the 1 percent, Occupy Wall Street, drone strikes and Obamacare. Though President Trump is only eight months into his term, we have already seen some words and phrases making a bid to help define his time in office.

At FiveThirtyEight, we have a tool that tracks the popularity of terms used on Reddit, the massive internet message board that is the fourth-most-visited site in the U.S. and the gathering place of some of Trump’s more rabid followers. We’ve now updated that tool with data through the end of July, which means you can use it to search through Reddit comments posted during the first six months of Trump’s presidency. Here we share some of the more intriguing trends we’ve found — changes in how often words, expressions and the names of popular figures crop up — and we encourage you to check out the tool yourself. Tweet @fivethirtyeight if you find something interesting.