In typical Donald Trump fashion the billionaire managed to be the big winner across social media during the Republican presidential debate even though he didn’t attend it.
Not only was Trump the presidential candidate to receive the most Google searches on Thursday evening but he was also mentioned the most on Twitter.
According to Brandwatch, a social media monitoring company, Trump was mentioned approximately 130,000 times on Twitter during the debate. Although this amount has significantly reduced from the last Republican presidential debate where Trump received around 170,000 mentions, it isn’t bad considering that Trump wasn’t even there.
After disagreements with Fox News and commentator Megyn Kelly Trump decided to boycott the debate and hold his own event across town to raise money for U.S. military veterans. Trump claims the night was a success and that he managed to raise six million dollars, a large proportion of which he donated himself, however he did not mention which group would be receiving the funds.
Trump also succeeded in stealing the limelight from his fellow GOP presidential hopefuls as his fundraising event received live coverage on CNN and MSNBC.
It seems that Trump’s decision not to attend the seventh Republican presidential debate has not been particularly harmful to his campaign as not one of his rivals emerged as “a central challenger” on the night.
Trump spoke out about his decision not to attend the event with seeming regret and said “I didn’t want to be here, to be honest.” He went on to explain his reason for boycotting the debate and stated:
“When you’re treated badly, you have to stick up for your rights – whether we like it or not.
Trump may not have taken part in the debate but he certainly won according to social media site Twitter’s statistics as he commanded a whopping 36% of all Twitter’s traffic during Thursday night’s debate.
Image by DonkeyHotey via Flickr under this Creative Commons License.
