With the current Twitter war between Trump and Cruz, one might ponder if Donald Trump actually does his own tweeting?
MotherJones’ Ben Dreyfuss wondered the same thing last year, because, as he put it, Trump’s account tweets so many weird things that he couldn’t have a professional ghost tweeter at the helm. That person would never let him send half the things he sends.
Investigating, he found a Washington Post profile of Trumps media handler, Hope Hicks, describing the tweeting process:
“On his plane, Trump flips through cable channels, reads news articles in hard copy, and makes offhanded comments. He’s throwing out his signature bombastic, sometimes offensive tweets. Hicks takes dictation and sends the words to aides somewhere in the Trump empire, who send them out to the world.”
Dictating isn’t the same as doing the tweets himself, because he’s not scrolling through his timeline, checking his mentions, nor having the full Twitter experience.
But another article in Wall Street Journal claims that Trump is, in fact, tweeting:
“Mr. Trump doesn’t use a computer. He relies on his smartphone to tweet jabs and self-promotion, often late into the night, from a chaise lounge in his bedroom suite in front of a flat-screen TV.”
Dreyfuss concluded a combination of both must be the case; sometimes Trump dictates, and sometimes he tweets.
The next thing to figure out was how many of the tweets were Trump’s own, and in order to do so, he looked at statistics from Twitonomy.com.
They showed that within the five month period prior to the article, @realDonaldTrump has tweeted 3,197 times.
A majority of those tweets (1,707) have come from Twitter for Android. Another 1,245 have come from Twitter.com. Ninety-nine have come from a BlackBerry, and another 99 have come from an iPhone.
Since Trump doesn’t use a computer, Twitter.com tweets are being posted by someone else. But which smartphone was Trump using? A second Washington Post article tells us that Trump does in fact tweet from an iPhone. That concludes that no more than 3 percent of Donald Trump’s last 3,197 tweets came from his fingers, and less if one of his aides also uses an iPhone.
However… this morning, Friday, March 25, 2016, Dreyfuss updated his article with a @realDonaldTrump tweet, responding to the cover story in this week’s National Enquirer about Ted Cruz with the link: http://bit.ly/1RkBAgiLyinTED
The link was created by campaign advisor and longtime employee of Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump, Dan Scavino, who has recently been appointed his social media director.
Would this confirm Trump doesn’t do any of the tweets himself? No. According to Hope Hicks, Trump will continue to tweet for himself despite Scavino’s new role. This confirms that up to 3 percent of Trump’s tweets, do in fact come from his own fingers.
Scavino, who tweets under the handle @DanScavino, has more than 51,000 followers on Twitter, and he’s tweeting his own jabs at Trump’s competitors.
Here are some more charts from Twitonomy about Trump’s tweets:
Featured image screengrab from Mother Jones. Permission to use from Mother Jones.
