Thursday, April 14, 2016

How Donald Trump Tweets

There's the "late night method" and "shout it out to the young ladies" method.

NYT explains:
The exact source of Donald Trump’s tweets has long been a matter of speculation. The tweets are so consistent with his persona that it’s hard to imagine anyone else coming up with them. But where in his busy schedule of making America great again does Mr. Trump find time to tweet?

At a CNN town hall moderated by Anderson Cooper on Tuesday, he cleared things up. “During the day, I’m in the office, I just shout it out to one of the young ladies who are tremendous,” Mr. Trump said. “I’ll just shout it out, and they’ll do it.” After about 7 PM, however, he operates Twitter himself.

This bears out the theory Ben Dreyfuss at Mother Jones developed in September, based on several news reports: “Sometimes he dictates, and sometimes he tweets.” Mr. Dreyfuss noted that Mr. Trump reportedly tweets from an iPhone, and only a minority of @realDonaldTrump’s tweets come from that device. Therefore, he estimated that “only 3 percent of Donald Trump’s last 3,197 tweets—at most—actually came from his fingers.”

A quick look at Mr. Trump’s recent Twitter activity, though, reveals a higher percentage of iPhone tweets. It also reveals a number of tweets sent from an Android device after 7 PM, when Mr. Trump says he’s doing his own tweeting.

It’s entirely possible that Mr. Trump has several phones at his disposal (he does, after all, have several houses). It’s also possible, as Mr. Dreyfuss notes, that some of his staff also use iPhones to tweet his bidding. Thus, it remains difficult to know which tweets Mr. Trump sent himself, and which ones he shouted at “the young ladies.”

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