Is Trump still writing his tweets? The evidence says he isn’t. Trump has a distinct Twitter style. It is apparently inimitable. At least by the co-inhabitants of the White House bunker. The ones tending to his twitter feed. Take today's Twitter rant:
First:
The so-called Whistleblower’s account of my perfect phone call is “way off,” not even close. Schiff and Pelosi never thought I would release the transcript of the call. Got them by surprise, they got caught. This is a fraud against the American people!
Second:
Somebody please wake up Mitt Romney and tell him that my conversation with the Ukrainian President was a congenial and very appropriate one, and my statement on China pertained to corruption, not politics. If Mitt worked this hard on Obama, he could have won. Sadly, he choked!
Third:
Mitt Romney never knew how to win. He is a pompous “ass” who has been fighting me from the beginning, except when he begged me for my endorsement for his Senate run (I gave it to him), and when he begged me to be Secretary of State (I didn’t give it to him). He is so bad for R’s!
Not one word is in caps.
There isn’t a spelling error or typo.
The syntax is clean.
It appears to be written by someone well-educated, who is doing their best to ‘dumb’ it down to replicate Trump’s style. But while it has some distinct Trumpian elements, it is plainly a ‘forgery’.
Consider the vocabulary. ‘Congenial’ is not a word Trump uses. In fairness, he did retweet a Greg Gutfeld tweet that used ‘congenial’ — but did he remember it? Or is it more likely that whoever curates his Twitter account recalled it? “Pertained’ is not a word in his usual vocabulary.
Trump has an extended lexicon of insults. But ‘pompous “ass”’ is not in it. His favorite put-downs allude to a lack of intelligence, sanity, toughness. He is concerned about appearance. He harps on failure. His number one insult is ‘fake’ followed by ‘failed’, ‘dishonest’, ‘weak’, ‘lying’, ‘racist’, ‘lightweight’, ‘dummy’, and ‘nasty’. But nowhere does pompous ass appear. The phrase is far removed from Queens, NY. It is more commonly found in an English drawing-room.
In the third tweet, ‘begged me for my endorsement’ is pure Trump. But the rhythm of the rest is someone else — (I gave it to him) … (I didn’t give it to him). This is a poetical juxtaposition absent in Trump’s stream-of-conscious, word vomits.
The tone is all wrong. In the first tweet, he mentions Schiff and Pelosi without a single disparaging adjective. The tenor of all three is an aloof and academic dismissal weakly disguised as a Trump rant. There is none of the feral energy, the incoherent, spit-flecked, bug-eyed rage of the normal id-stoked, Trump tweet.
The punctuation is formulaic. There are only three exclamation points — each one ending a tweet. It is as if a prim old lady had taken a stab at some ‘naughty’ language and come up with ‘gosh-darned’. The writer is not fond of shock speech, but salts in a single ecphoneme as a coda to register their passion.
The tweets are written to make a point, not to cudgel someone into submission. They are the offerings of someone more used to a debate club than a boxing ring. It’s as if the bully in a high school movie had strong-armed the grammar nerd to write his essay — but told him to make sure it “sounds like something I would write”.
It’s part of the evolving style of Trump's social media. He never used to retweet. Now that’s the majority of his stream. He frequently quotes commentators in the body of his tweets — but I doubt he can remember what they were saying long enough to tweet it out. He has a whole new level of audiovisual material that he never used before.
There is no possibility that he would spend the time necessary to put it all together — even if he had the skill.
Trump used to boast that Twitter gave him the ability to speak ‘unfiltered’ to his followers — now, even that is a lie.
Addition: As I am writing this, another ‘Trump’ tweet appears:
The Media is “Fixed” and Corrupt. It bears no relationship to the truth. The @nytimes & @washingtonpost are pure fiction. Totally dishonest reporting!
It’s the same formula. Can you imagine Trump saying, ‘It bears no relationship to the truth’. Note the single exclamation point at the end. There is no insult attached to the names of the two newspapers. But the author did capitalize ‘Fixed’ and ‘Corrupt’. Nice try — but no cigar.
FAKE!!!!!!!!