President Trump Tweets Supreme Leader Kim Jong-Un on Nuclear Weapons: A Comparison with Climate Change †

A set of 125 tweets about North Korea’s Supreme Leader Kim Jong-Un by President Trump from 2013 to 2018 are analysed by means of the data mining technique, sentiment analysis. The intention is to explore the contents and sentiments of the messages contained, the degree to which they differ, and their implications about President Trump’s understanding and approach to international diplomacy. The results suggest a predominantly positive emotion in relation to tweets about North Korea, despite the use of questionable nicknames such as “Little Rocket Man”. A comparison is made between the tweets on North Korea and climate change, madefrom 2011–2015, as Trump has tweeted many times on both issues. It is interesting to find that Trump’s tweets on North Korea have significantly higher positive polarity scores than his tweets on climate change