@WWE_Trump

Twitter bot mixing the words of Donald Trump and professional wrestlers

CONTEXT

The bot (@WWE_Trump) was created in the spring of 2016. The U.S. presidential primaries were reaching a fever pitch, Donald Trump was winning states, and the Republican political contest was seeming more and more like the stuff of strange dreams or Russian literature. I got interested in the idea of "Donald Trump as wrestling showman" after reading an article by Matt Taibbi in Rolling Stone that made this comparison compelling.

The ninth Republican debate, in Greenville, South Carolina, is classic Trump. He turns these things into WWE contests, and since he has actual WWE experience after starring in Wrestlemania in 2007, he knows how to play these moments like a master. Interestingly, a lot of Trump's political act seems lifted from bully-wrestlers. A clear influence is "Ravishing" Rick Rude, an Eighties champ whose shtick was to insult the audience. He would tell ticket holders they were "fat, ugly sweat hogs," before taking off his robe to show them "what a real sexy man looks like."

I made @WWE_Trump as an assignment for an art class. The bot relies on the existing Ruby gem twitter_ebooks, which uses a simple pseudo-Markov generator as its language model. All I really did was gather corpora — Trump tweets, Trump speeches, and wrestler promo speeches — and tweak the code to try to make the generated tweets more interesting. Specifically, the bot only produces tweets that contain keywords that rank highly in the vocabulary of Trump (e.g., the word "polls") and wrestlers (e.g., the word "Wrestlemania").

Many of the tweets don't make grammatical or semantic sense, but sometimes the most nonsensical tweets are the most entertaining.