Does Donald Trump Write His Own Tweets?

A White House team prepares messages using the president’s own style of language.

One of the more mundane questions currently circulating Washington is whether Donald Trump actually writes his own Twitter messages. If so, a new question arises. What motivates the president of the United States to publish tweets with such ferocity and so early in the morning? Is he, as some have speculated, draped in a bathrobe, slumped in front of Fox News, reacting to the broadcasts? Or, on the contrary, does a team of advisers write the messages for him?

The Boston Globe newspaper has attempted to uncover part of the mystery. It has spoken with two people who are familiar with the process of redacting the tweets delivered from the @realDonaldTrump account, which has 52 million followers on Twitter. The reality is that many of the messages are actually written by other staff within the White House who deliberately imitate the histrionic and volcanic style of Trump, replete with hyperbole, short phrases, and words typed in capital letters, such as “SAD.”

The publication of a tweet from Trump is a much less spontaneous event than it seems. According to the Globe, when the communications team in the White House wants the president to publish a certain message on Twitter, three or four possible tweets are drafted up on a board. Trump will then choose which one he likes the most, sometimes making alterations, before launching it toward his followers in cyberspace.

In theory, Trump’s tweets might seem a trivial matter. But the president’s messages have moved markets after threatening a company or disclosing a business decision, ruined personal lives — for example, after announcing the ban on transgendered people in the military — and have even been the medium through which he has made significant government announcements, such as the sackings of ex-Chief of Staff Reince Priebus and ex-Secretary of State Rex Tillerson.

The tweets have even generated legal decisions. This past Wednesday, U.S. District Judge for the Southern District of New York Naomi Reice Buchwald ruled that it is unconstitutional for Trump to block followers on Twitter, because it infringes on the freedom of expression within a public forum.

The constant analysis of Trump’s tweets can also generate peculiar stories. In March 2017, Andrew McGill, an editor at The Atlantic magazine, created a Twitter account, @TrumpOrNotBot, which uses an algorithm to detect patterns of style in the pre-presidential tweets of Trump and determines the possibility that a new message has actually been written by the current head of state.