Trump’s Twitter habit is most intense in the morning
The Times has a huge multi-author piece on Trump N Twitter. It’s nothing we don’t already know, I think, but it does provide some details that are interesting.
Mr. Trump’s Twitter habit is most intense in the morning, when he is in the White House residence, watching Fox News, scrolling through his Twitter mentions and turning the social media platform into what one aide called the “ultimate weapon of mass dissemination.”
Of the attack tweets identified in the Times analysis, nearly half were sent between 6 a.m. and 10 a.m., hours that Mr. Trump spends mostly without advisers present.
After waking early, Mr. Trump typically watches news shows recorded the previous night on his “Super TiVo,” several DVRs connected to a single remote. (The devices are set to record “Lou Dobbs Tonight” on Fox Business Network; “Hannity,” “Tucker Carlson Tonight” and “The Story With Martha MacCallum” on Fox News; and “Anderson Cooper 360” on CNN.)
He takes in those shows, and the “Fox & Friends” morning program, then flings out comments on his iPhone. Then he watches as his tweets reverberate on cable channels and news sites.
We mostly knew that, but it’s still astounding – that he can find four hours to watch tv and gossip about it on Twitter. In practical terms, the less work he does the better, but it’s still insulting and infuriating that he’s mostly just hanging out and watching teeeeeeveeeeeee.
The symbiotic relationship between Mr. Trump and Fox News is apparent through the president’s tweets. In fact, he praised the network in his first tweet on the first morning he woke up in the White House.
He has since praised and promoted the network, individual shows and conservative news media personalities more than 750 times.
Over all, at least 15 percent of the content in Mr. Trump’s tweets seemed to come directly from Fox News and other conservative media outlets.
I’m surprised it’s not more.
Once Mr. Trump arrives in the West Wing — usually after 10 a.m. — Dan Scavino, the White House social media director, takes control of the Twitter account, tweeting as @realDonaldTrump from his own phone or computer. Mr. Trump rarely tweets in front of others, those close to him say, because he does not like to wear the reading glasses he needs to see the screen.
Oh brilliant – a president who won’t read in front of other people because he’s too vain to wear glasses. (They would actually improve his looks. They would make him look less stupid.)
Instead, the president dictates tweets to Mr. Scavino, who sits in a closet-size room just off the Oval Office until Mr. Trump calls out “Scavino!” Often, he prints out suggested tweets in extra-large fonts for the president to sign off on. (A single-page article that Mr. Scavino recently printed out for him ran to six pages after the fonts were enlarged, according to one person who saw it.)
That’s some large font.
Along with Michael Dubke, who served as White House communications director for several months in 2017 and is from Buffalo, home of the famous chicken wings, Mr. Scavino presented some tweets to Mr. Trump in degrees of outrageousness: “hot,” “medium” or “mild.” Mr. Trump, said one former official who saw the proposed messages, always picked the most incendiary ones and often wanted to make them even more provocative.
Yes but they’re not just “outrageous” or “incendiary” or “provocative.” A president talking in public this way isn’t a game, isn’t cute, isn’t a personal quirk, isn’t funny, isn’t a good story. A president talking in public this way is a road to horrors. Work people up enough and they will get violent.
He plotted for days to tweet about Mika Brzezinski, the liberal co-host of the popular MSNBC morning program, according to former White House officials, before finally posting one morning in June 2017. He called her “low I.Q. Crazy Mika” and wrote that she had been “bleeding badly from a face-lift” during a New Year’s Eve party.
And that day maybe more men punched the nearest woman than would have otherwise, because Trump’s tweet made them feel contempt and disgust for women.
In October of last year, the president started telling his aides that he planned to denounce Stormy Daniels, a pornographic-film actress who claimed to have had an affair with him more than a decade earlier. He said he wanted to call her a “horse face.”
Several current and former aides recalled telling Mr. Trump that it was a terrible idea and would renew accusations of misogyny against him.
But more to the point, it would also inflame misogyny in others, and we already have more than enough misogyny to deal with.
Of course he went ahead and did it.
Hmmmmm….
But worth a try, surely. After all, the proof of the pudding is in the wearing.
It’s a thing. Rick Perry for instance.
I will never cease to be amazed at the gap between the image Trump wants to project — the bold, marches-to-his-own-drummer leader — and the reality of the image- and polling-obsessed mass of insecurities he is.
Of course it’s more intense in the morning. Later in the day he’s Sundowning.
How liberal is Mika Brzezinski? And this is what she gets for giving Trump free air time in 2016.
Shades of Scrooge in his office calling out “Cratchit!” ? I wonder if he lets Scavino go out and buy the occasional scuttle of beautiful, clean coal?
Speaking of insecurities, I just noticed our public library system just ordered copies of a book called Commander in cheat : how golf explains Trump summarized as
Not planning on reading it, as I get my fill of Trump here, in small (though still ultimately indigestible) gobbits, though through no fault of our host, as any dish using ingredients that are as foul and rancid as Darth Cheeto will always be nauseating and taste like crap, however many the condiments added, however small the serving. Or, to mix metaphors, Ophelia is giving us, as a public service, dutiful, daily snapshots of the alarming progression of a case of political necrotizing fascitis; as important and useful as her service is (thank you, Ophelia, I can’t imagine the number of mental hazmat suits you’ve worn out, or the oceans of brain bleach you’ve needed while traversing this continent of dreck and offal), I don’t want to dig deeper to watch a whole movie or miniseries about it.
The thing that gets me is how carefully, and for how long, he plans his insults, and how much he savours them. On the hopefully infrequent occasions I say something mean to or about someone else, it’s a spur of the moment impulse which I invariably instantly regret, and typically apologise for when I can–but (from the brief bits we’re reading here; I concur with YNNB) saying carefully-crafted and chewed-over insults is the fucking highlight of his week.
Honestly, if his Twitter insults – those pathetic, childish, often incoherent mini-rants – are genuinely the result of days of careful crafting then Trump’s mind is in a sorrier state than anyone suspected. My youngest grandson can provide better insults* at the drop of a hat, and he’s eight years old.
*A couple of years ago his teacher told him off in class for being childish (6 years-old!) and without missing a beat my grandson retorted with ‘I bet you only want to be a teacher so you can make kids miserable’. The teacher told me that in person when I picked the boys up from school that afternoon. She actually thought I’d be on her side and was surprised when I collapsed in uncontrollable laughter.
He can’t read without his glasses unless the print is extra-extra-large. Another factor in how terrible he is at reading the teleprompter, and how often he goes off script or mispronounces words or mistakes them for some other word.
AoS @ 8 –
But being better at insults than Trump isn’t really something to be proud of. Are you confident that your grandson’s teacher is that awful?
What gets me is that after carefully crafting and chewing over his insults for days they are so… infantile and weak. I mean, almost every day someone here effortlessly calls him something worse (or better, I suppose) than the sad little nicknames that he comes up with after hours of mental exertion. You’d think with all the practise he gets insulting people he’d have got good at it by now.
I really should remember to refresh tabs if I’ve left them open all day. That way, I don’t end up leaving a comment that seems to just be a rephrasing of someone else’s comment (Hi, AoS)
I could loan him my book of Shakespearean insults. Now there was someone who knew how to craft an insult.
YNnot Bruce @ 6 – thank you. That’s pretty much what I’m going for – a few highlights without going too far into the sewer. I can’t not be obsessed with the rising sewage myself so I try to make the gleanings tolerable for others.
That Twitter article in The NY Times was brilliant both in information and delivery. Brilliant and horrifying.
If some incel was acting like this, obsessively twittering, counting his likes, saving up feeble insults for a Gotcha moment, we’d say poor, pathetic creature. But this is the – all right, I still don’t believe he holds that position.
You’re welcome! Your efforts do not go unrecognized.
I think he has to be careful to come up with an insulting nickname that’s simple enough for him to remember. Clever is beyond him in any case, but more importantly, it would be hard to recall conveniently.
And simple enough for his base. His base is people who want things simple (even if they themselves are educated; the educated members of his base want it simple – lower taxes, stop immigration, put uppity women and black people in their place).
Way too many people believe there are simple answers to complicated problems. I see it in Bernie’s base, too, the simple way in which he will tell them if we fix the economics, sexism and racism will fix themselves, because it’s all economics. Yeah, no. And the fixes for the economics often lack nuance. When someone like Elizabeth Warren comes up with “a plan for that”, she gets mocked because her plans are not simple, they are full of turns and edges that scare people. Clinton was the same way; she had complex plans. That isn’t to say they were more right; it’s not just about being complicated. But most of our problems look like they were drawn by Escher, and the solution will not be simple.
And then there’s the environment…which makes all the others look simple by comparison. And the left likes the simple answers, too.
Ophelia, #10:
Yup. She was terrible, not at all suited to teaching such young kids. The incident I mentioned was the result of another child loudly belching during class. My grandson and several others laughed so the teacher yelled at them for behaving like children (again, these were five- and six-year-olds) and told them they were to miss that days playtimes (recesses). One could understand a teacher having a bad day now and then – we all have them – but tthis was an almost-daily occurrence, with her regularly reducing kids to tears for the most minor transgrssions. She also had a remarkably high turnover of teaching assistants, with many asking to be moved to other teachers because they couldn’t handle her bad-tempered outbursts at the pupils.
She left the school at the end of last year to train to teach at secondary school level, which I hope will suit her better.
AoS, sounds like the stereotyped movie/television teacher. Maybe she learned to teach from those old kids shows that showed teachers like that, and didn’t notice that they weren’t positive characters.
Maybe. I think that she has the potential to make a good teacher but she needs to be with older students. There seemed to be no understanding that very young children cannot be expected to behave in the way that teenagers can, and I believe that her own behaviour towards the children was a result of frustration caused by her own failure* to realise that fact and adjust her methods accordingly. There was something of the stereotypical Victorian school ma’am about her, though.
*Or refusal to accept it. I find it hard to believe that other, more senior teachers hadn’t tried helping her to better deal with things.
Ah, I see, that does make a difference. Reducing kids to tears regularly is no good at all. It’s too bad administrators didn’t step in, or something.
I have a bit of a bad conscience about my own early student days, because I think I was probably a smartass – I remember once being told to go stand outside the classroom for a bit as punishment and having to be forcibly removed instead of just going. First grade. I’ve felt guilty about it since forever.