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Rogue potus twitter11/12/2023 Ostensibly a challenge to public perceptions of the account’s motivations, all this negation also serves as a kind of disclaimer. They stress that they are “not whistleblowers of illegal activity”, “not a news agency”, “not heroes”, and “not magical wizards”. What is more telling, perhaps, is staffers are keen to emphasise what they are not, a strategy that linguists call negation. This is apparently the reason why they actively encourage the public to be sceptical about their account. The staffers claim to be “devout Republicans” (perhaps to the slight surprise to some of their Twitter followers) who “want the American people to regain control of their government through civic engagement, careful contemplation, intellectual scrutiny, activism, and ultimately voting action”. This site provides a little bit more information in terms of the staffers’ background, mission, and rationale. The best tools for doing this date back to Aristotle’s Rhetoric, in which he identified three key ways in which discourse (especially in the public sphere) can be persuasive and effective: “pathos”, an appeal to the emotions of the audience “logos”, an appeal to reason and rational argument and “ethos”, the work of establishing and reinforcing the reliability of the speaker or author.Īlongside the Twitter account, the people behind recently set up an accompanying website. In particular, we can look at their use of language to legitimise themselves and their cause. There is much speculation over the account’s legitimacy, and the person or people behind the account refuse to divulge their identity of course, any actions that the “rogue” staffers could take to “prove” themselves might entail potentially serious personal and legal consequences.īut without providing direct evidence, whoever is behind the account is using other means to establish credibility. One such account is which claims to be maintained by “the unofficial resistance team within the White House”, currently with 865,000 Twitter followers. The accounts purport to provide snippets of insider information to the public its “revelations” extend from exampled staff behaviour and overheard speech from inside the West Wing to the actions of Trump and other senior White House figures. Donald Trump’s administration has seen several “rogue” Twitter accounts claiming to be from staffers in the White House and other US governmental agencies.
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