Donald Trump Has Twitter Ghost Writers Who Expertly Mimic the Voice of a Man With Brain Worms 

By Megan Reynolds  |  May 22, 2018 | 2:10pm
Politics

Donald Trump isn’t writing all of his own tweets because he’s very busy running the country and also evading the consequences of his own malfeasance, so sometimes other people must assume that great burden.

Trump has two phones—one for making phone calls to Sean Hannity before bed and the other for fomenting racism and international crises on Twitter. As Politico reports, he has refused to swap out his Twitter phone for a new one every month as security would apparently necessitate, preferring instead to send rude missives with his sausage fingers to 52 million people on a daily basis using the same vulnerable device. But, when the big boy needs a juice box and a nap, others emerge from the shadows to take the reins.

The Boston Globe has an in-depth look at how the tweets get made:

Staff-written tweets do go through a West Wing process of sorts. When a White House employee wants the president to tweet about a topic, the official writes a memo to the president that includes three or four sample tweets, according to those familiar with the process.
Trump then picks the one he likes best, according to the two people, neither of whom wanted to be named because they’re not authorized to talk about the operations. Sometimes Trump will edit the wording and sometimes he’ll just pick his favorite for blasting out to his 52 million Twitter followers.

Additionally, the esoteric punctuation, sentence fragments, occasional typos, and misspellings are all a part of what could be called a “social media strategy” if we lived in hell, which we do. Staff members apparently “relish the scoldings Trump gets from elites,” because the scintillating intellectual discourse around his grammar problems and egregious exclamation points means that he’s still in touch with his base. Or something?

Martha Brockenbrough, founder of the Society for the Promotion of Good Grammar, said that the president’s disregard for standard English plays into the public persona he has created for himself that he’s a man of the people, despite his billions.
“Grammatical conventions tend to be elitist and always have been,” said Brockenbrough. “The lack of regard for it, and the fact that he’s now having American tax dollars fund people to ape his style, is meant to poke people like you and me in the eye — people for whom language matters.”

Wow, a very smart and not-at-all insane system for the president’s preferred communication channel. Seems very wise to let White House employees write speculative fiction in the form of tweets that can also start wars!

Read the entire piece here.

 
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