Something doesn’t add up about Donald Trump’s latest Twitter explosion

| 10:37 pm EDT April 18, 2018
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On some level there’s some weirdness every time Donald Trump reaches for his Twitter account. But when he launched into a rant this morning about Stormy Daniels and Governor Jerry Brown and other assorted targets, it was something other than the content of his tweets that stood out as surreal. It was what took place fifteen minutes before he began tweeting, and it raises questions about whether we really saw what we thought we saw this morning.

From time to time, Donald Trump’s Twitter account begins bulk-retweeting various political figures who agree with Trump’s agenda. It usually happens in the afternoon or evening, and never coincides with Trump’s actual first-person tweets. It’s long been believed that these kinds of transactional retweets are being conducted by Trump’s social media director Dan Scavino, and that Trump himself has nothing to do with them. It seems like Scavino goes out of his way to do these retweets at a time when Trump himself isn’t doing any tweeting.

At 5:44am eastern time this morning, Trump’s account began doing multiple retweets, which was odd, because it almost never happens at that time of day. Then at 5:59am eastern time, Trump himself began ranting on Twitter. There are only three possible explanations for what transpired here. The first is that this was a grand coincidence; the one time that Scavino woke up before dawn and randomly decided to begin retweeting things on Trump’s account was the one morning in which Trump just happened to start his morning rant an hour and a half earlier. The odds of that seem small.

The second explanation would be that Donald Trump, who is currently at Mar-a-Lago, decided to wake up a handler who was with him, and prompted that person to begin doing retweets, only for Trump himself to begin ranting fifteen minutes later. This of course doesn’t even make sense. The third explanation would be that whoever was doing the retweets, whether it be Scavino or someone else, was also the person who wrote and posted the subsequent tweets that were supposedly from Trump himself – even as Trump was passed out or eating cheeseburgers. As crazy as it sounds, there is a real possibility that Donald Trump’s first ever public attack on Stormy Daniels didn’t even come from him. We’re still not sure what to make of it, but it’s an odd one.