There’s something entirely off-kilter about that Donald Trump and Barron Trump story

| 2:13 pm EDT May 31, 2017
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Either Donald Trump woke up today with a new personality and far more sophisticated grasp of the English language, or his handlers are now pretending to be him on his Twitter account. His staff has tweeted on his behalf before, but generally with generic proclamations and event announcements. These new tweets from faux-Trump are first-person and personal. They also coincide all too neatly with at least one suspiciously Trump-sympathetic story planted in the media today.

The dead giveaway that someone else has taken over Trump’s Twitter account came this morning when he made fun of himself for his earlier “covfefe” typo (link). Trump’s brain doesn’t work that way, and even if his staff did convince him to try to make light of it, he still couldn’t have figured out how to pull it off. So it’s a safe bet that this tweet wasn’t really written by Trump either: “Kathy Griffin should be ashamed of herself. My children, especially my 11 year old son, Barron, are having a hard time with this. Sick!” (link)

So it stands out that the above tweet, obviously written by Trump’s new media handlers, just happens to coincide with a story about Barron Trump having thought his father was actually dead when he saw the images of Kathy Griffin pretending to behead him. This story surfaced in TMZ (link), a news outlet run by Harvey Levin, a Trump ally. Considering the nature of the story, it could only have been planted by the Trump team.

Did this Barron Trump incident really happen? There’s no way to know. But the coordinated nature of the story’s rollout makes it highly suspicious. Suddenly Donald Trump’s Twitter account is playing for sympathy, and he’s getting confirmation on it from a friendly news site. And this comes just as Trump has rather clearly surrendered his Twitter account to someone who’s trying to clean up his image by pretending to be a more human version of himself.

Come to think of it, did Donald Trump’s handlers purposely make the “covfefe” typo last night, just so they could use it as a self-deprecating joke this morning? We’ll be looking at every Trump-sympathetic new leak today to see how deep this new strategy runs.