Move over Dr Disrespect, Ninja, and Bernie Sanders, Donald Trump is becoming a streamer. Today, the President of the United States created his own Twitch channel, a streaming service owned by Amazon, a company that has been the subject of much criticism from Trump during his tenure as president. At the moment of publishing, there’s been no official statement from Trump or his administration about the new initiative. In fact, right now the channel has less than 3,000 followers and there’s nothing on the channel other than some promotion for his upcoming rally in Minneapolis, Minnesota.
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Of course, it’s unlikely Donald Trump will ever use the channel to play Fortnite or chase a Jet Set Radio Future speedrun record, but it will presumably get lots of use in the build-up to the 2020 election as Trump travels across the country and energizes his base. That said, despite there being zero content, the channel’s chat is pretty lively right now, with lots of unmoderated chat spewing from it. In fact, the home page currently has close to 2,500 viewers.
As you may know, Trump isn’t the first politician to turn to the growing platform; Bernie Sanders created an account back in June.
“It’s another opportunity, I think, to tap in to a potentially supportive audience that we may not be hitting other ways,” said a member of Bernie’s campaign team back in August while explaining to The Verge why the Vermont Senator started a channel in the first place. “Our goal with Twitch is to not only let people know what we’re doing on the campaign every day, and what Bernie’s doing โ but also hear from them, and bring their opinion into what we’re trying to do and into the political process.”
Again, it remains to be seen what Trump will use the account for, but it’s almost certainly going to be just for campaign promotion. He isn’t the first politician to tap into Twitch’s massive platform, and he likely won’t be the last.
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