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For the past few years,Donald Trump‘s go-to platform has been Twitter. But not too long ago, the now-president was a novice tweeter.
In a new interview withPolitico, Trump’s former social media manager Justin McConney, who worked for the Trump Organization from 2011-17, opened up about his past career of directing the real estate mogul’s social media presence from “old-school Luddite to a social media maven.”
In fact, Trump had very little understanding of Twitter as McConney recalled him saying, “I’ve heard of that. Isn’t that what [then-PresidentBarack] Obamaused?”
Though McConney had full reign of the official @RealDonaldTrump account, it wasn’t until February 2013 when Trump published hisfirst unsupervised tweet.
By 2013, Trump had posted more than 8,000 tweets and was tweeting at a pace of 10 times a day.
As McConney navigated Trump on the uses and strategies of a well-curated Twitter account, his job became increasingly more demanding as Trump phoned him at all hours with orders of tweets.
According to McConney, Trump had him print out his Twitter mentions and would use Sharpie pens to scribble responses that would later be typed up and tweeted out to the public. Trump even had McConney print out 8×10 glossy photos of him for his signoff before they were posted online.
“He was very old school back then. He was not someone who really used computers or went on the internet very much,” McConney said of the early days of Trump’s unspontaneous tweets.
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In addition to drafting statements,Melania Trumpwould be used as a pipeline.
McConney recalled how he received phone calls from Melania who would hand her husband the phone after saying hello. And during those phone conversations, Melania even offered her thoughts on what McConney should tweet.
Though McConney no longer works for Trump, he is still keeping an eye on the president’s social media content. As for the advice he would give Trump, McConney suggested he lighten up on the negative rhetoric, including the rants about “fake news” or Robert Mueller’s “witch hunt” of an investigation.
“He should go back to having more of a sense of humor about himself,” McConney said.
source: people.com
