Hail to the Tweeter-in-Chief
Are you a Twitter addict? Does tweeting keep you up at night, tapping your thoughts into the Twittersphere? Do you tweet in CAPITAL letters? Or are you more likely to emote in emoticons? And does your Twittering make you feel like a Master of the Twitterverse?
If you’ve answered in the affirmative to all of the previous, you are most likely Donald J Trump, President of the United
States, Tsar of Twitter, Emperor of the Emoticon, Builder of
Borders, Wielder of Bibles, Fakir of Fake News and subject of a new BBC documentary, baldly billed Trump in Tweets.
More than most, Donald Trump has made social media his weapon of choice to tilt his lance at democracy, diplomacy and just about anything that gets his goat. ‘ The 45th President of the United States of America’ (his terse Twitter biog is a rare example that doesn’t require fact-checking), has 82.4 million followers and counting. He follows 46 accounts. Those include his children, a cohort of Fox News hosts, Derryborn TV producer Roma Downey and some of his own luxury hotels and golf courses. The 46 was 47 until Trump’s best British buddy, Piers Morgan, described his coronavirus theories as “batsh*t crazy” in April. Bye bye Piers. On May 26, the bosses at Twitter decided to put a halt to the Real Donald Trump’s gallop when they placed a label on his tweets about postal voting, saying they required fact-checking. Following the killing of George Floyd and the nationwide protests that followed, Trump’s looting and shooting tweet was censured and just last week, a tweet promising “serious force” against protestors contemplating an ‘Autonomous Zone’ in Washington DC was restricted. Yet even as the Tweets keep unrolling the followers keep rising and the war continues.
Of course Trump in Tweets will most likely be obsolete by the time of transmission. That’s the nature of the beast. No matter. This is more about how Trump Learned To Stop Worrying and Love the Twitter Bomb. It boasts access to Trump’s inner circle: or at least those who used to be in that rarefied realm such as former White House Director of Communications, Anthony Scaramucci; former White House Press Secretary, Sean Spicer, and former Trump political consultant Sam Nunberg (part of the tweet team that fuelled the conspiracy theory falsely claiming that Barack Obama had a fake birth certificate).
Rudy Giuliani, Trump’s personal lawyer and at time of writing still a member of his inner circle, also adds his tuppenceworth as does Peter Costanzo, who started Trump’s Twitter account and penned the first ever tweet on May 4, 2009 (a shout-out to watch Trump on Late Night with Letterman). In the beginning the tweets were typed by others, until 2011 when the real Donald Trump got real and got personal, most infamously with Rosie O’Donnell. Then came that morning in January 2017 when he tweeted, typo included to make it real real: “I am honered to serve you, the great American people, as your 45th President of the United States!’ The rest is Twistory.