President Donald Trump is well known for his Twitter rants, and — apparently — he is proud of them. According to Bob Woodward’s tell-all book, Fear: Trump in the White House, the veteran journalist claimed that the president prints his most popular tweets to read later on, reports The Huffington Post.
Since hitting the campaign trail for the 2016 presidential election and continuing into his first term of office, Trump has used Twitter as his primary method of public communication. His tweets have been shared, analyzed, questioned, applauded, and ridiculed. His continued usage of the platform indicates that Trump believes it to be an efficient way of getting his point across, however.
According to Woodward’s book, Trump is so obsessed by his Twitter usage that he has had his most-liked tweets printed out. The alleged point of this practice is for Trump to analyze the results of his statements in an effort to improve his reach.
“[President Trump] ordered printouts of his recent tweets that had received a high number of likes, 200,000 or more,” the veteran journalist said in the book. “He studied them to find the common themes in the most successful… He seemed to want to become more strategic, find out whether success was tied to the subject, the language or simply the surprise that the president was weighing in. The most effective tweets were often the most shocking.”
Trump reportedly takes Twitter so seriously that he had mixed feelings when the social media platform upped its character limit for tweets from 140 to 280. On one hand, Woodward contended, Trump said it was “a good thing,” but on the other, it is “a bit of a shame because I was the Ernest Hemingway of 140 characters.”
Trump has denied most of the claims made in the book, calling it a “scam” and accusing it of using “phony sources.”
An example of a recent Trump tweet that received more than 200,000 likes is one in which he uses the “drain the swamp” message after an anonymous White House official wrote an op-ed to The New York Times. The op-ed claimed that some subversive staff within the administration work to oppose the president’s most dangerous ideas, notes the Hill Reporter. The majority of the president’s tweets receive between 50,000 and 80,000 likes.
According to the book, Trump doesn’t care that his tweets aren’t “presidential” because Twitter is his “megaphone to the world,” and a way to “speak directly to the people without any filter,” People magazine reported. The book, which Woodward said is based on hundreds of “deep background” interviews with sources close to the president, was released on Sept. 11 of this year.
White House Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders released a statement earlier this month denying the claims made in Woodward’s book.
“This book is nothing more than fabricated stories, many by former disgruntled employees, told to make the president look bad,” the statement said, as reported by a separate People article.
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