Donald, that's enough Twitter for today
Barack Obama had his Blackberry, Hillary Clinton had her private email server and Donald Trump has – well – a Twitter account. And according to White House officials, it turns out that’s all he has really since it turns out his staff have scrubbed his iPhone clean of any app that isn’t the little blue bird.
The presidential Twitter account @realDonaldTrump is a hotbed of random 3am musings, love letters to Fox and Friends and casual political threats. It’s also the American president’s favourite method of public communication.
My twitter has become so powerful that I can actually make my enemies tell the truth.
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) October 17, 2012
In a tell-all from Axios, it turns out that stripping the president’s right to app downloads has the purpose of ‘limiting his screen time’ and ‘forcing a more disciplined President Trump’.
Everyone knows I am right that Robert Pattinson should dump Kristen Stewart. In a couple of years, he will thank me. Be smart, Robert.
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) October 22, 2012
This isn’t entirely surprising news, given that Nato catered to Trump’s short attention span by restricting speeches to four minutes at an upcoming summit. However, the new revelations show just how much reining in the 45th President of the United States needs to keep him on message.
The article explaining that his staffers do ‘everything [they] can to load up his schedule to keep him from getting worked up watching cable coverage, which often precipitates his tweets’.
His tweets have attracted a lot of media attention – one was even quoted in a hearing about Russian election interference with dismissed FBI director James Comey. On the subject of James Comey, Trump’s explosive Twitter threat against him which reads, ‘James Comey better hope that there are no “tapes” of our conversations before he starts leaking to the press!’ has also opened up a lot of legal questions about whether Trump secretly records the goings-on in the White House.
James Comey better hope that there are no "tapes" of our conversations before he starts leaking to the press!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) May 12, 2017
While Trump has yet to start an international incident in 140 characters, he’s certainly opened himself up to a lot of controversy. There’s one 2014 tweet however which the Daily Show was kind enough to dredge out of the woodwork.
Are you allowed to impeach a president for gross incompetence?
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) June 4, 2014
Who knows, maybe we’ll find out sooner than we think?
In the meantime, President Donald Trump has continued to tweet away to his heart’s content and is currently providing details of his first foreign tour in the lead up to G7.
So yeah, thanks for that, Donald…
