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Then along came business genius, branding wizard Donald J. Trump, who realized that you don’t need to spend capital making ads, then hoping the ads get swift-boated. All you have to do is craft a 140-character, newsworthy tweet. In February of 2015, I wrote an op-ed in the Baltimore Sun that said presidential candidates should rule Twitter the way Kim Kardashian does.

“It’s social media; if you treat it exclusively like formal media, all you’re doing is chucking a powerful platform in the wastebasket,” I wrote. “Social media is the place to be human. To climb down from those aloof pedestals and walk among the people.” But even I could never have imagined the extent to which candidate Trump actually proved those words true. In the 2016 GOP primaries, and to a slightly lesser extent the 2016 general election, he rode free headlines to victory.

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On May 5, the entire news cycle was dominated by a picture of then-candidate Trump eating a taco bowl. The New York Times wrote, “Of all the ways Donald Trump has shocked the political system, one of the most significant is how he wins primary after primary with one of the smallest campaign budgets.”

The price tag on Trump’s free media exposure was in the billions, and it grows every time he clicks the blue “tweet” icon. Type “cov” into the search bar, and Google knows you’re searching for “covfefe,” a word that didn’t exist until the president accidentally tweeted it. Twitter helped take Donald Trump from Chris Cillizza’s punch line to GOP nominee to President of the United States.

All future presidential candidates from every party will adopt his swift-boating social media strategy, which changed American politics forever.

Anybody who thinks he’s ever going to stop tweeting doesn’t understand the power of the president’s smartphone. It’s like asking The New York Times to shut down the printer or CNN to run a test pattern all day — only on a larger, more meaningful scale.

Eddie Zipperer is an assistant professor of political science at Georgia Military College and a regular LifeZette contributor.[lz_pagination]