Donald Trump on Wednesday took a brief respite from ginning up fear over immigrants, threatening Iran, and lying about Robert Mueller to discuss another issue near and dear to his heart: His Twitter account. In a rambling interview with the Fox Business network, the extremely online president whined that he was being censored on the social media platform, claiming—naturally without evidence—that shadowy forces are making it “very hard for people to join me on Twitter,” and that he’s lost followers because the company is “biased toward Democrats.”
“What they did to me on Twitter is incredible,” Trump said, which is true only in the sense that his tweets literally lack credibility. “I have millions and millions of followers, but I will tell you, they make it very hard for people to join me on Twitter and they make it very much harder for me to get out the message.” Saying that “these people”—meaning, in theory, Jack Dorsey and company—are “all Democrats,” the president posited that he would pick up “five times more followers” were he to suddenly announce that he’s a liberal. “I was picking up a hundred-thousand followers every few days,” Trump told host Maria Bartiromo, who appeared to take the president’s self-serving conspiracy theorizing at face value. “Then, all of the sudden it stopped,” Trump continued, though noting—paradoxically—that he is “hotter now than he was a number of months ago.”
“Twitter is just terrible, what they do,” Trump said, patting his Capitol Hill acolyte Devin Nunes on the back for the lawsuit he filed against the company and suggesting “legislation may be needed to create competition,” whatever that means. “Look, we should be suing Google and Facebook and all that, which perhaps we will, OK?”
The semi-coherent remarks came as Twitter and other companies attempt to head off scrutiny in Washington, and about two moths after Trump brought his complaints about his allegedly dwindling Twitter following to Dorsey himself in a White House meeting. That Trump, whose unhinged and sporadically-capitalized tweets are ubiquitous in American politics, is complaining that he isn’t being heard on the platform is as rich as the Kentucky Fried Chicken gravy he loves so much. But his rant Wednesday morning might be more than the reflexive recitation of talking points about conservative censorship he’s been trotting out since his favorite conspiracy-peddlers were booted from Twitter and Facebook.
The complaining may also reflect his unease about recent reports that his posts are generating less and less interaction, meaning that one of his most reliable political weapons could be losing its potency. To Trump, a man who has never ever been at fault for anything in his life, that can’t be because users are getting tired of logging on to see him say “NO COLLUSION!” for the hundred-millionth time. No. Surely, it must be because of some liberal plot to take him down, which is somehow keeping him from getting his message out there and simultaneously totally failing. “I’ve had so many people come to me, ‘Sir, I can’t join you on Twitter!’” Trump told Fox Business. “I see what’s happening, a hundred percent.”
— Exclusive: Gabriel Sherman reveals Donald Trump and Marla Maples’s pre-nup
— Mitch McConnell’s wife gave him a special reelection present: $78 million in federal funding
— The horrifying truth laid bare by Trump’s screwball visit to the U.K.
— Inside the multi-million dollar, totally messed up renovation of the Plaza Hotel
— From the Archive: The murder of a hedge-fund manager that stunned New York society
— Why Chernobyl’s unique form of dread was so addicting
Looking for more? Sign up for our daily Hive newsletter and never miss a story.
