Aides urge letup but Trump still early to rise, early to tweet

WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump — under pressure to cut back on 140-character cannonades — shot back Tuesday morning with two tweets defending his use of social media and slamming “fake” news organizations for trying to deny him his political sword and shield.

“The FAKE MSM is working so hard trying to get me not to use Social Media,” he wrote at 7:58 a.m., turning his sights on the mainstream media after two warm-up tweets linking to Fox & Friends clips. “They hate that I can get the honest and unfiltered message out.”

Seventeen minutes later, Trump — who met with congressional Republicans on Tuesday to brief them on last month’s overseas trip — tweeted again. “Sorry folks, but if I would have relied on the Fake News of CNN, NBC, ABC, CBS, washpost or nytimes, I would have had ZERO chance winning WH,” he wrote.

Even though the mainstream media was the target of his Tuesday morning ire, it is Trump’s own team that has been pointedly critical of his tweeting habits, with members of his legal, communications and political staffs urging him to cut back on self-expression in the interest of political self-preservation.

Trump mostly has brushed them off, although he has intermittently stuck to anodyne pronouncements about policy or feel-good meetings with foreign leaders, as he did during his nine-day trip to the Middle East and Europe. During that time, aides said, he was simply too busy to tweet.

But mornings belong to Twitter for the president, and most of the social-media damage — or good, in Trump’s view — has taken place as he’s revving up to start his day.

Trump’s lawyers, inside and outside the White House, have grown increasingly concerned about his social-media ruminations, outbursts and angry self-defenses on legally sensitive topics. These include the investigation into whether his campaign colluded with Russia, his sudden firing of FBI Director James Comey and the battle over his revised executive order barring travelers from some predominantly Muslim nations.

Publicly, Trump’s spokesman, Sean Spicer, has continued to defend the president’s tweeting — often telling reporters “the tweet speaks for itself” when pressed on an especially controversial statement during briefings. But he has privately urged his boss to self-edit more, according to three people familiar with the situation.

On Monday night, Trump’s legislative affairs director, Marc Short, said that “many” of the president’s tweets were helpful in getting out his message of change to voters and legislators. But he also said that the president’s woes, especially ongoing congressional investigations, were making it harder to stay “focused” on passing ambitious tax overhaul, health care and infrastructure bills.

And Trump’s legal effort to have his travel ban upheld, which he hopes to wage in the Supreme Court, have been undermined by his repeated tweets suggesting that the measure was intended to block Muslims from entering the country, according to legal experts.

In a series of tweets, he undermined his own lawyers by poor-talking the rewritten executive order, which was drafted to defend against lawsuits alleging that the ban discriminated on the basis of religion. Trump praised “the original travel ban, not the watered down, politically correct version” issued in March — and attacked both the Justice Department and the federal courts.

He went on to contradict his own aides, who have avoided the use of the hot-button phrase “travel ban,” writing “what we need and what it is, a TRAVEL BAN!” He said it would be imposed on “certain DANGEROUS countries” and suggested that anything short of a ban “won’t help us protect our people!”

That prompted a noteworthy response from a prominent conservative lawyer, George Conway, who is also the husband of the Trump adviser Kellyanne Conway. George Conway mocked the president with his own tweet.

“These tweets may make some ppl feel better, but they certainly won’t help OSG get 5 votes in SCOTUS, which is what actually matters. Sad,” wrote Conway, who recently withdrew his name from consideration for a top post at the Justice Department.