In a presidential administration defined by uncertainty, one thing has been consistent: The Trump Twitter voice, a mixture of emotional volatility, baseless allegations, unnecessary capitalization and copious exclamation points.
But perhaps unsurprisingly for a man who earned a living by licensing his name to others, a new report says that President Trump doesn’t write all of his tweets, relying on a “Twitter machine” of staff members who strive to replicate his trademark voice down to the smallest quirk.
According to the Boston Globe, West Wing staffers “employ suspect grammar and staccato syntax” in writing the president’s tweets. They take pride when the posts bait “elites” into criticizing grammar or typos, and when their efforts are indistinguishable from those pecked by the president’s own finger or two.
In fact, Trump’s staff “has become so adept at replicating Trump’s tone that people who follow his feed closely say it is getting harder to discern which tweets were actually crafted by Trump sitting in his bathrobe and watching ‘Fox & Friends’ and which were concocted by his communications team,” reports the Globe’s Annie Linskey.
The Trump Twitter post approval process
There is a method to the seeming madness: When a White House staffer wants Trump to tweet about a topic, he or she sends the president a memo with three or four sample tweets. Trump picks the one he likes best, and out it goes. Sometimes he’ll edit lightly.
It’s a much more streamlined process than other presidents and candidates have followed in the past. Presidential candidate Mitt Romney’s campaign required 22 people to sign off on a tweet before it was posted. President Obama followed a less complicated but still rigorous approval system.
For those who feel unnerved that Trump’s Twitter feed isn’t the exact X-ray of his id that it seems, technology can help you process. Andrew McGill, a writer at The Atlantic, created @TrumpOrNotBot, a Twitter algorithm that rates if tweets sent from Trump’s account were written by the president or his staff.
It was launched in March 2017, but McGill frets that its accuracy may have declined. “They’ve gotten increasingly sophisticated about mimicking him online,’’ he told the Globe.
