A Twitter account that formats Trump tweets as press releases gives a new perspective to Trump’s presidency in 140 characters or less.
My policy for this newspaper is that we try to only write commentary articles that are local and timely. After all we are a student newspaper, so we should focus our attention on things that are pertinent to students. Full disclosure, I’m about to break my own rule.
I want to talk about what I consider to be the most important twitter bot in existence — @RealPressSecBot.
@RealPressSecBot checks @RealDonaldTrump’s twitter feed every five minutes and turns the tweet into an image of an official White House press release.
This one twitter bot is capable of more than all the editorials at all the left-leaning newspapers in all the world.
There is something profound in the simplicity. You can’t accuse a direct quote of being biased.
However, by making Trump’s tweets a press secretary memo, you remove the mask of machismo and showmanship to reveal the core truth that is often blinded by the spotlights.
The words on the screen are no longer written by publicity king Donald John Trump. They are written by the President of the United States of America.
The words “So much Fake News being put in dying magazines and newspapers. Only place worse my be NBC News, CBS News, ABC News and CNN. Fiction Writers!” are no longer the words of everyone’s love-to-hate-him reality tv character.
Those are the words of the leader of our country, attacking nearly every member of the fourth estate.
And the words “I told Rex Tillerson, our wonderful Secretary of State, that he is wasting his time trying to negotiate with Little Rocket Man…” make for a vastly more serious threat coming from our national figurehead than from man who tackled and pummeled Vince McMahon at Wrestlemania.
Or what about the words “The Russia hoax continues, now it’s ads on Facebook. What about the totally biased and dishonest Media coverage in favor of Crooked Hillary.”
Suddenly this lying false equivalency meant to diminish the legitimacy of the media coverage of ongoing independent agency investigations into collusion with Russia is no longer the work of orange-faced, straw-haired clown, but of a media mastermind who knows how best to manipulate the minds and attention spans of the hundreds of millions of gullible dupes that make up the American public.
Like me.
@RealPressSecBot is not local or timely, but it is so invaluably important to be worth breaking the rules.
