Donald Trump is known for his hasty (and frequent) social media posts.
He regularly has midnight meltdowns on Truth Social, has shared back-to-back posts about AI nonsense on the platform, and has also threatened people he’s unhappy with in long messages.
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But in recent months, select posts concluded with an oddly formal sentence: “Thank you for your attention to this matter.”
For example, a post from the president on October 6 says: “Beginning November 1, 2025, all medium and heavy trucks entering the United States from other countries will be subject to a 25% tariff. Thank you for your attention to this matter!”
“It’s really different than the way you usually publish,” said Claire Robertson, an assistant professor of psychology who focuses on political polarization and extremism at Colby College in Maine.
Robertson added that Trump often uses morally and emotionally charged words in his posts (such as “deception” and “corrupt”), which quickly capture attention. “He still uses a lot of the kind of moral and emotional language that we know gets attention,” Robertson said of Trump’s social posts as a whole.
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Negative and moral-emotional language attracts engagement, clicks and sharing in a “really polarized way,” he added. “When something is more moral and emotional, it tends to travel within a political group rather than between political groups.” In other words, these types of posts are designed to make people angry, and will often be shared with someone who will be equally angry.
“But ‘thank you for your attention to this matter’ is neither negative nor moral, so it’s especially interesting,” Robertson said. “It doesn’t fit very well with some of the established findings. It’s just strangely formal.”
Here’s what this phrase (and Trump’s use of it) might say about the president and his communication style, according to experts.
“Thank you for your attention to this matter” is a phrase that asserts control of a situation and its messages.
This type of language is certainly formal; It reads like an email from HR or a warning from a lawyer. But experts say it could also go further.
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“From a clinical point of view, the repeated use of the phrase ‘thank you for your attention to this matter’ can be interpreted as more than a formality. It has an undertone of control and authority,” said Shenikka Moore-Clarke, a holistic psychotherapist.
“We know that Trump is very conscious of wanting to be in control of a situation,” said Robertson, who noted that he is also known for “controlling” handshakes, pulling people hard and making them slightly off balance.
A phrase like this could also create an expectation about how people should interact with these posts on social media. For some people, “Language often becomes a way of managing image and power and positioning oneself as setting the terms of engagement,” Moore-Clarke explained.
“This could lead to a specific type of power dynamic when dictating.”how people should relate” to what a person has to say, Moore-Clarke said.
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It’s also a bit presumptuous, Robertson added. “Everyone is supposed to pay this attention,” Robertson said.
There is no room to question what the sign says. “It’s (subtle) but it can be interpreted as controlling,” Moore-Clarke explained.
Furthermore, although this phrase includes the words “thank you,” experts question whether it is genuine. “It’s less about gratitude and more about command,” Moore-Clarke said, “and it’s a way of affirming control, which implies that readers must comply or take note.”
The phrase demands power.
Posts that end with “thank you for your attention to this matter” stand out from others on Trump’s social media, according to Moore-Clakre.
“This…sounds like ‘this is something important to pay attention to,’ so it (kind of) appeals to you,” Moore-Clarke explained.
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In more or less words, he’s telling readers that this is something everyone else should consider important too, he added.“I have a feeling that it is strategic and makes his followers trust him more as a source of power, even if what he said is not true or harmful to certain groups.”
Tends to highlight more serious posts.
“With language, sometimes we have certain cues that… I don’t know if it’s a scientific term, but you can often call them ‘microcultures,’ where something means something different in a specific place,” Robertson explained. For example, your community may refer to a nearby restaurant as “the corner place” instead of its real name.
In this case, if you follow Trump’s social media religiously, it’s possible “that posts that end in ‘thank you for your attention to this matter’ could be, for example, more serious than some of his other posts. It could be a sign that this is something that has political relevance,” Robertson said as an example.
It is true that this formal ending does not usually accompany the memes that Trump publishes criticizing other politicians or a call to buy his son’s new book.
Instead, “thank you for your attention to this matter” ends posts in which Trump shares something he’s done or something he’s ordering others to do, whether announcing Casey Means as surgeon general or ordering Democrats to “open the government.”
Trump may be doing this intentionally, but it could also be unintentional. “We use linguistic cues all the time when we don’t even realize it,” Robertson added. Has anyone ever pointed out that you only call your partner a specific nickname when you’re angry? This is an example of that.
At the very least, he doesn’t use the term “thank you” much, Robertson said, which makes this shutdown of a fairly new social network all the more fascinating.
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