<\/a>Why did my recent post–featuring excerpts from the transcript of Donald Trump\u2019s New York Times interview-<\/a>-go viral? I have a theory.<\/p>\n

But first, some statistics: \u00a0After I published it here on Occasional Planet\u2014the progressive political blog that I co-founded and edit\u2014the post got so many hits that the site crashed several times. We\u2019ve been publishing since February 2010, and nothing even close to this has ever happened. On a typical day, we expect between 500 and 1,000 total clicks on the various stories that we write. The Trump transcript post blew those numbers out of the water: Two days after publishing this post, we had more than 2,600 hits; on the 7^{th<\/sup> day after publication, we reached 20,000 hits in a single day. To date, more than 65,000 people have clicked on this single post, and more than 10,000 of them have shared it, via this website, to Facebook.<\/p>\n}

And those crazy [for us] numbers are only part of what happened. I cross-posted the article on Daily Kos, and it got more than 43,000 additional shares on Facebook. For the week ending December 3, it made the list of High Impact Posts.<\/p>\n

How did this happen? Here\u2019s my theory–It’s Access Hollywood<\/h2>\n

I\u2019m hoping that most readers were seriously and sincerely interested in reading the full account\u2014or at least part of it\u2014just to get a better understanding of what Trump said and how he said it\u2014and because the post offered a convenient way to do so, if they had missed the original story in the New York Times. You could link to the transcript<\/a> on the Times\u2019 website, but, as far as I know, it was not offered in print.\u00a0 According to our site\u2019s Stat Counter, more than 8,000 people who came to the post on our site clicked on the outbound link to the full transcript at newyorktimes.com.<\/p>\n

There’s also, I think, a segment of readership that read the post, and the full transcript, out of \u201cprurient\u201d interest. And this is where it gets really interesting, I think.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s as if the headline had said, \u201cHere\u2019s What Donald Trump Doesn\u2019t Want You to Read About What He Said at the New York Times.\u201d\u00a0<\/strong> That would have been a rather click-bait-y headline\u2014and I avoid those\u2014but I\u2019m speculating that the effect was similar.<\/p>\n

I think that some readers viewed the transcript as something like an episode of \u201cAccess Hollywood,\u201d or the after-show extras from \u201cThe Bachelorette,\u201d or other reality TV shows: Here\u2019s what was left on the cutting-room floor. Here\u2019s what you didn\u2019t see in the press coverage of the latest episode of \u201cCelebrity Apprentice President.\u201d<\/p>\n

What I excerpted were, in essence, the outtakes from the interview.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s sad that Donald Trump is treating the presidency as a reality TV show; and it\u2019s sad if some people read the interview transcript in that spirit. But I\u2019m just glad that they\u2019re reading it. Not just because a viral post is good for my writer\u2019s ego [I cannot lie: It is], but because of what readers may have learned from it about the mind and thought-processes of the person who is about to [shudder] become our 45^{th<\/sup> President.<\/p>\n}

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