#including fake news articles and tweets and interviews and whatever

[letapollojusticesayfuck]

when will i accept that i absolutely do not have time to do all the things i want to do. i have a full-time retail job that i know gets super busy around the holidays. i should not be running through hypotheticals of running an aa vacation zine

[divulgacion-alternativa]

Todos los Enlaces de la Publicación del 26 de Abril de 2021

Fuente: benjaminfulford.net

Todos los Enlaces de la Publicación del 26 de Abril de 2021:

These people have been trying very hard to kill a majority of the world’s population for decades now and have already killed far more people than Adolf Hitler ever did.  They have now lost control of most of the world’s military power.  This can be seen by the fact the people running the Joe Biden avatar “government” were denied entry into the Pentagon and now plan to run to NATO headquarters to seek protection.  Protection that NATO cannot provide because nobody is willing to use nuclear weapons on their behalf, Pentagon, Russian FSB, French and British military sources say. https://thecommonsenseshow.com/agenda-21-conspiracy-economics/several-world-leaders-including-putin-and-netanyahu-want-biden-gone-and-trump-appears-be-part-plot

Now we have a news anchor confirming this plan with a Freudian slip where he says “almost four months into the vaccination effort providers are beginning to run out of people who want to be euthanized.” http://82.221.129.208/euthanized.mp4

It appears the “dumb people,” have already self-selected. http://www.madnesshub.com/2021/04/us-vaccination-sites-are-closing-from.html

People who still follow orders and believe in the system are also suffering from cognitive dissonance as the contradictions in the official “pandemic” story begin to pile up.  Here you can watch my sister, Martha Fulford, an expert on contagious diseases, telling mainstream Canadian TV that lockdowns make no sense because the areas with the toughest lockdowns also have the highest number of new cases. https://globalnews.ca/video/7748177/medical-expert-sound-alarm-over-collateral-damage-of-lockdowns

The holes in the official story mean the red pill is just beginning to take effect on her and countless of her colleagues around the world.  Soon they will all realize there are more “pandemic” cases in regions that locked down because that is where the authorities more actively participated in creating the scamdemic in the first place. https://www.sgtreport.com/2021/04/covid-cases-are-growing-the-most-in-locked-down-states/

As examples of this government connivance here we have images showing the book “Covid-19 and the great reset,” on the bookshelves of the Prime Ministers of Greece and Australia. https://www.rumormillnews.com/cgi-bin/forum.cgi?read=170674

To underscore this, Japanese military intelligence sent us screenshots of freedom of information requests sent to governments around the world asking for proof the “new virus” exists and answers saying no government or agency has such proof.

We shouldn’t be surprised then to see “Covid-19” tests that have predetermined negative and positive results.

Also, a high rate of massive vaginal bleeding, neurological damage, and damage to the skeletal and skin systems has been observed… this will be used for massive-scale depopulation…India’s Public Health Ambassador Dies Day After Taking COVID Vaccine…women reporting the sudden onset of menstrual irregularities and miscarriages (up 400x according to some health providers) since the v started…”

http://www.battleforworld.com/2021/03/31/covid-vaccine-autoimmune-response-part-1/#IsraelCovVaxSideEffectsOne

https://www.globalresearch.ca/israeli-people-committee-april-report-lethal-impact-vaccinations/5743361

What all of this means is that the Davos Octagon crowed failed to reach the critical mass needed to cement their rule via a mass culling of the population, vaccine passports, and total human enslavement.

Attempts to foment civil war and martial law in the U.S. are also failing.  We note the George Floyd psy-ops was wound down with a “guilty verdict,” for the policeman who supposedly killed him.  This did not stop provocateurs, many of them brought in from Eastern Europe, from trying to start race riots anyway.  They have also started more shootings of innocent black people to try to keep fanning the flames of unrest.  However, they are not succeeding.

https://www.zerohedge.com/political/lebron-james-tweets-image-columbus-cop-threatens-youre-next

https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2021/04/watch-black-lives-matter-mob-attacks-truck-just-minutes-getting-verdict-wanted/

https://www.zerohedge.com/political/nbc-deceptively-edits-911-call-video-fatal-police-shooting-involving-knife-wielding-teen

Attempts to start a war with Russia/Iran/North Korea etc. are also failing big time.  In the latest twist, it turns out “Dutch parliamentarians, like their British and Baltic colleagues, had a conversation via Zoom with a deep fake imitation of the chief of staff of the Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny on Wednesday.”  It seems they are resorting to CG because they can’t even find real Russian opposition to fan the flames of war. https://nltimes.nl/2021/04/24/dutch-mps-video-conference-deep-fake-imitation-navalnys-chief-staff

Meanwhile, if you monitor the corporate propaganda media, you can see that day-by-day they are piling on UFO stories at an unprecedented rate.  This is a clear sign the cabal is trying to dig out of their pandemic hole with space alien fears. https://www.vice.com/en/article/z3xewj/air-canada-westjet-porter-pilots-ufo-sightings

https://www.dailystar.co.uk/news/weird-news/astonishing-nasa-clip-captures-ufo-23952604

https://www.the-sun.com/news/2731522/most-compelling-ufo-vid-puerto-rico/

https://www.the-sun.com/news/2770635/spacex-starship-near-miss-ufo-astronauts-prepare-crash/

And now just on cue, we are getting videos of the aliens themselves.

https://benjaminfulford.net/wp-content/uploads/2021/04/Aliens.in_.Russia.mp4?_=1

Speaking about space aliens NASA (Not A Space Agency) is putting out ever more ridiculous press releases.  They have been filming ever more mars stuff, apparently on Devon Island in the Arctic, and are even throwing in “mars helicopters.” https://odysee.com/@ConspiracyReality:3/00089—Mars-Perseverance-Rover-Landing-Debunked:2

Now they put out a press release saying that for just $2.89 billion or about one hundredth the cost of the original moon landings, they will send “the first woman” and the “first person of color” to the moon.  I suppose they can do it cheaply now because they do not need to build expensive film sets, computer graphics will do the trick.  It is a good guess the budget will be $2.88 billion to line the pockets of NASA scammers and $0.01 billion to sub-contract out the CGs to some computer game slave farm. https://www.nasa.gov/press-release/as-artemis-moves-forward-nasa-picks-spacex-to-land-next-americans-on-moon

In a similar vein, can anybody identify the circle with a hole in the middle in the sky next to the erupting volcano in Japan? Is that some sort of CG artifact or what? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RGnIuXPup64&t=81s

Speaking about fantasy and computer games, this chart alone tells you the U.S. stock market is now just a mass hallucination with no link to reality. https://cms.zerohedge.com/s3/files/inline-images/U.S.-margin-debt-YOY-2021-04-17.png?itok=s-3h6fpI

The U.S. economy itself is also losing touch with reality, as more and more free money is pumped to the masses in a desperate attempt to stop them from rising up with pitchforks.  Of course, all that free money means people have no incentive to do real work which is why a McDonalds in the U.S. has been forced to pay people $50 just to come to a job interview. https://www.zerohedge.com/markets/whatever-it-takes-tampa-mcdonalds-exposes-americas-systemic-labor-shortage-forced-pay

What all of this means the U.S. Corporate government is in its death throes.  Even Corporate propaganda media are now saying Washington DC is going to become just another U.S. state. https://www.cbsnews.com/news/dc-statehood-bill-pases-house/

“Global governance should reflect the evolving political and economic landscape in the world, conform to the historical trend of peace, development and win-win cooperation, and meet the practical needs in addressing global challenges.” http://www.xinhuanet.com/english/2021-04/20/c_139893671.htm

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[suitep]

Bot!

‘Just because I don’t like him’ is rich. For the willfully ignorant, please read:

Five articles of impeachment have been proposed by members of Congress who say there are sufficient grounds to act.

ARTICLE I: OBSTRUCTION OF JUSTICE

Donald J. Trump, in violation of his constitutional oath and obligations, has engaged personally, and through his subordinates and agents, in a course of conduct designed to delay and impede an investigation and to conceal information sought by the Federal Bureau of Investigation in the course of its investigation into Russian interference with the 2016 United States presidential election, including any possible collusion between Russia and Donald J. Trump.

National Security Adviser Michael Flynn misled Vice President Pence about his discussions with the Russian ambassador to the United States.

Donald J. Trump demanded FBI Director James Comey’s loyalty, and asked Comey to let Flynn go.

Donald J. Trump fired FBI Director James Comey while the FBI was investigating Russian interference with the 2016 presidential election, including possible collusion with the Trump campaign.

Donald J. Trump admitted in a television interview that he had the Russia investigation on his mind when he fired F.B.I. Director Comey.

Donald J. Trump told the Russian Foreign Minister and Russian Ambassador to the United States, “I just fired the head of the FBI. He was crazy, a real nut job.… I faced great pressure because of Russia. That’s taken off.”

Donald J. Trump personally dictated a misleading statement for his son and former Trump campaign operative Donald Trump Jr. to use to explain Trump Jr.’s meeting with a Russian attorney who had invited Trump Jr. to meet in order to give him damaging information about Hillary Clinton as part of the Russian government’s efforts to help his father’s campaign.

ARTICLE II: VIOLATION OF ARTICLE I, SECTION 9 OF THE US CONSTITUTION—FOREIGN EMOLUMENTS

“No Title of Nobility shall be granted by the United States: And no Person holding any Office for Profit or Trust under them, shall, without the Consent of the Congress, accept any present, Emolument, Office, or Title, of any kind whatever, from any King, Prince, or foreign State.” —Article I, Section 9

Donald J. Trump has accepted, without the consent of Congress, emoluments from foreign states.

Donald J. Trump refused to divest or place his assets into a blind trust.

Donald J. Trump refused to release his tax returns.

Donald J. Trump’s attorney has acknowledged his businesses receive funds from foreign governments.

Donald J. Trump owns 77 percent of Trump International Hotel in Washington, DC, owns the Trump Tower in New York City, and owns the Trump World Tower in New York City. Foreign payments received by Trump owned businesses, so far, include:

An event estimated to cost $40,000–$60,000 held by the Embassy of Kuwait at the Trump International Hotel.

$270,000 in payments from the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia for rooms, catering, and parking as part of a lobbying effort at the Trump International Hotel.

$30,000 from groups promoting Turkish American relations as part of a convention at the Trump International Hotel. Rents from tenants at Trump Tower owned by foreign states, including the Industrial and Commercial Bank of China and the Abu Dhabi Tourism and Culture Authority.

ARTICLE III: VIOLATION OF ARTICLE II, SECTION 1 OF THE US CONSTITUTION—DOMESTIC EMOLUMENTS

“The President shall, at stated Times, receive for his Services, a Compensation, which shall neither be increased nor diminished during the Period for which he shall have been elected, and he shall not receive within that Period any other Emolument from the United States, or any of them.” —Article II, Section 1

Donald J. Trump has accepted emoluments from the United States other than this presidential salary.

Donald J. Trump refused to divest or place his assets into a blind trust.

Donald J. Trump refused to release his tax returns.

Donald J. Trump has caused the US government to spend money at businesses in which Donald J. Trump has an ownership interest including:

$73,000 by the Secret Service for golf carts

$1,092 by the National Security Council for lodging at Mar-a-Lago

As of September 25, 2017, Donald J. Trump had visited at least one Trump-branded property on 85 days of his presidency, as compared with 164 days in which had not.

ARTICLE IV: UNDERMINING THE INDEPENDENCE OF THE FEDERAL JUDICIARY AND THE RULE OF LAW

Donald J. Trump, in violation of his constitutional oath and obligations, has engaged in a pattern of conduct designed to undermine the authority of the federal judiciary to carry out its constitutional responsibilities, including:

Calling a US District Court judge a “so-called judge.”

Pardoning former Sheriff Joe Arpaio for criminal contempt of court.

ARTICLE V: UNDERMINING FREEDOM OF THE PRESS Donald J. Trump, in violation of his constitutional oath and obligations, has engaged in a pattern of conduct designed to undermine the freedom of the press guaranteed by the First Amendment to the United States Constitution, including:

Repeatedly calling press organizations “fake news.”

Circulating a video of himself violently wrestling a man covered by the CNN logo.

Personally attacking members of the press including a tweet saying that then–Fox News anchor Megyn Kelly had “blood coming out of her whatever,” and a tweet saying that MSNBC anchor Mika Brzezinski “was badly bleeding from a face-lift.”

[omgstupendousbouquetbasement]

US Confirms Report Citing Iran Officials as Saying 1,500 Killed in Protests

The United States has confirmed a news report citing unnamed Iranian officials as saying about 1,500 people were killed in a crackdown by security forces on anti-government protests last month.

In a report published Monday, London-based Reuters said it obtained the death toll from three Iranian interior ministry officials who said the fatalities included "at least 17 teenagers and about 400 women as well as some members of the security forces and police."

Special Report: Iran's Leader Ordered Crackdown on Unrest - 'Do Whatever it Takes to End it'

Order, confirmed by three sources close to the supreme leader’s inner circle and a fourth official, set in motion the bloodiest crackdown on protesters since the Islamic Revolution in 1979

In a Monday tweet, the State Department quoted U.S. Special Representative for Iran Brian Hook as saying the Reuters report "underscores the urgency for the international community to punish the perpetrators and isolate the regime for the murder of 1,500 Iranian citizens."

Special Representative for Iran Brian Hook: “The @Reuters report on the massacre ordered by @khamenei_ir underscores the urgency for the international community to punish the perpetrators and isolate the regime for the murder of 1,500 Iranian citizens.” https://t.co/TpUncLjDcv

— Department of State (@StateDept) December 23, 2019

Reuters' death toll was much higher than the latest fatalities reported by British rights group Amnesty International, which said in a Dec. 16 statement that it documented the killings of at least 304 demonstrators by Iranian security forces in days of unrest that erupted on Nov. 15.

Hook's reference to the "murder of 1,500 Iranian citizens" also marked a substantial increase in the Trump administration's assessment of the number of people killed in Iran's crackdown.

In a Dec. 5 briefing to reporters, Hook said it appeared that the Iranian government  "could have murdered over a thousand Iranian citizens since the protests began."

US Official: Iran Protest Deaths May Have Topped 1,000

Deadly protests erupted last month after government boosted fuel prices by as much as 300%

Iranian State-approved news agency Tasnim quoted an official at the Supreme National Security Council (SNSC) as saying the Reuters report referencing the deaths of 1,500 people was "fake news."

"These claims are based on premeditated psychological warfare and lack credibility," Alireza Zarifian Yeganeh said, echoing previous Iranian dismissals of Western reports about fatalities in the protests.

But Iran has declined to try to prove the Western reports wrong by releasing its own figures for those killed, wounded and arrested in the crackdown on the protests. Iranian authorities sparked the demonstrations in dozens of cities nationwide by raising the subsidized price of gasoline by 50%, further straining the finances of Iranians facing high unemployment and inflation in a shrinking economy under heavy U.S. sanctions.

In a Dec. 16 interview with VOA Persian, Amnesty's Middle East researcher Philip Luther said he expected the group to raise its figure of 304 protesters killed due to its ongoing examination of "credible" reports showing Iranian security forces used live ammunition while suppressing the demonstrations.

Amnesty did not respond immediately to a VOA Persian request for comment on the Reuters report citing the figure of 1,500 people killed in the unrest.

Amnesty's reported death tolls from Iran's unrest have been widely quoted by Western news outlets, which, besides Reuters, have been unable to verify the full scale of the killings due to Iranian restrictions on their access to the country.

The rights group has said it compiles its death tolls from reports whose credibility it ascertains by interviewing and cross-checking details provided by a "range of sources inside and outside Iran, including victims' relatives, journalists and human rights activists involved in gathering the information."

This article originated in VOA's Persian Service.  

from Blogger https://ift.tt/2Zp6cWD via IFTTT

[soft-pages]

Why It Is Fun To Hate Taylor Swift

1. She writes songs about her past loves that are not always so subtle about who they are about. 

     People see this as offensive to men in the media they are fans of or in general because it is an invasion of some sort into the private lives of the men. People also see it as “whiny” and “annoying,” and “can she please just write about anything else?” Those men she writes about? Most of them, if they are artists, write or sing about love and their own personal relationships themselves. That’s not an invasion? Also, Taylor is invading her OWN personal life in order to release pent up feelings, free herself, and also let her listeners know that she relates to them. The more personal and less subtle, the more we can relate. Secrets and songs that are not on a deep personal level from an actual real experience just aren’t that relatable, and in my experience, don’t really help me when I’m going through something deep and personal. Relationships are not all she writes about. She has written about friendships (Fifteen), her mother (The Best Day), forgiveness (Innocent), a dying boy (Ronan), and even about her being the one doing wrong in a relationship (Back To December). People like Adele (literally every album, but more explicitly Someone Like You), Ed Sheeran (also every album, but more explicitly Don’t), and Justin Bieber (Sorry) don’t get criticism in this way. Why is that? If she is whiny and annoying, why are you listening to her? More importantly, why are you talking about her? Focus on people you actually can relate to and enjoy listening to. 

2. All she does is date. She jumps from guy to guy like it’s nothing.

       This goes along with the first and I think this is a super silly and played out thing for people to say about Miss Swift. Find something original. But even my mother says it. The media, including something as simple as the morning news or newspaper, has drilled it all into our heads as a “fact.” It’s not, though: http://taylorswift.wikia.com/wiki/List_of_Taylor_Swift%27s_ex-boyfriends. She is 27 going on 28. Eight seem like a very normal amount. She also has not dated one guy after another, unless you count Tom Hiddleston only weeks after her and Calvin Harris’ split, which I don’t, considering it’s one time and everyone has done something similar at some point. I am 21. I can tell you that I have dated much more than 8 men. No one is calling me out for it. It is NORMAL. More importantly, if all the men she has dated, and continues to date, obviously know about her reputation as a dater, then why do men keep dating her? If they know “she’s just going to write a song about them,” then why do they do it? Why are they not called out for it? Why is no one blamed but the woman the way women are always blamed? If it is just for publicity for themselves, then that is even more pathetic. Sounds like sexism to me. 

3. She’s fake.

       This really means “she’s too nice.” It’s as simple as that and you all know it. She acts humble when she receives an award, all of her interviews are her smiling and happy, she compliments people regularly, she donates to charity, she visits sick children and people in hospitals, she sends personal gifts to her fans, she defends everyone involved in the music making process and their right to be paid fairly, she is a supporter of all women and is open about this in all of her actions including her “squad,” etc, etc. She wants everyone to like her and she has cared about that up until her 1989 album. Her wanting everyone to like her has led her to mistakenly say things she didn’t mean. In a short twitter disagreement I’m sure some of you are aware of, Nicki calls out MTV for being racist and not including enough nominations or awards for those of color and different body types, and in the midst of this calls out videos nominated with slim women while the only other nomination including much women was Taylor’s. Taylor tweets Nicki saying “I’ve done nothing but love & support you. It’s unlike you to pit women against each other” and “If I win, please come up with me!! You’re invited to any stage I’m ever on.” Clearly she missed the point and later tweets Nicki “I thought I was being called out. I missed the point, I misunderstood, then misspoke. I’m sorry, Nicki.”  http://www.billboard.com/articles/columns/pop-shop/6641794/taylor-swift-nicki-minaj-twitter-argument-timeline  If you’re not a fan of Taylor or even hate her, you might have seen this as her being just another white girl with white privilege who doesn’t know her place. Clearly, she is a white girl with privilege who, in this moment, was forgetting that she had this privilege, as many white people do. You forget that it’s not about joining someone up on stage, it’s about fighting for that person of color’s right to win and be the leader of the fight. You have to take yourself out of it and realize that if you are being called out in this way, it isn’t to be malicious, it is shine light on a problem in our society. Taylor missed this point because she is constantly trying to build up girls and women, and also in the fight against the media and haters who are always calling her out and hating on her for every little thing. I think her being called fake is purely because she has been in the limelight a long time and she is obviously trying to be nice to everyone at all times. That irks people. On a personal level, my own boyfriend told me that I irk people purely because I go out of my way to be nice: “your being too nice is frustrating and makes it seem like you can’t be a real person. A real person is mean sometimes.” Maybe that’s the same reason for Taylor, who knows.

4. She plays the victim. She lies.

       I’m putting these two together because I honestly barely understand why they are reasons. Is the victim thing because of her singing about being hurt in relationships? Is it because of the Kim & Kanye debacle or just all celebrity riffs? The only other riffs I can think of are with Calvin Harris and Katy Perry. Possibly some with women who were in her “squad” and now are not. I covered the relationships thing but the Katy thing? Seems kind of silly and the only one who has addressed it is Katy. She is the only one who has spoken semi-openly about it, as well as Calvin Harris. I feel Bad Blood is too strong of a song to be written about Katy. Plus, we all have had multiple friendships that have ended in a bad way but that doesn’t really mean we need to hate either person for it, especially since we are not even a part of that relationship and there were no actual confirming words on Taylor’s part. Calvin Harris is… honestly, I never cared for him. From his snapchats before dating Taylor Swift, he always seemed really immature. Taylor used a fake, Swedish name for “This Is What You Came For” just so that he would receive the spotlight alone and probably because he wanted to be immature and petty, she decided to say that she helped write it, which is rightful of her to do so. He was clearly petty like I thought he would be and went on a twitter rant while she sat back and didn’t say a word. Maybe that’s why she is viewed as playing the victim? Because she barely says anything and when she does, she apparently never takes the blame. This is obviously not true considering instances like her apology to Nicki. Also, her alleged song about Kanye (Innocent) with lyrics like “who you are is not what you did.” One more small example: Back To December, allegedly for Taylor Lautner with lyrics like “so this is me swallowing my pride, standing in front of you saying I’m sorry for that night.” Doesn’t seem victim-like to me. Next, she gets the trademark as a “liar” and a “snake.” This is because of ONE instance–the Kanye video where Taylor agrees to a line and later says she never agreed to it in Kanye’s Famous: “Me and Taylor might still have sex…I made that bitch famous.” Before I get into that, if anyone remembers, Kanye embarrassed and interrupted Taylor’s grammy win in 2009 because he felt someone else deserved it more. Whether he was wrong or not, that was extremely disrespectful and a really painful memory for her. Then at the 2015 MTV Video Music Awards Taylor makes light of it with a joke, says kind words about Kanye, and graciously presents him with the Video Vanguard Award. Then came the lyric he wanted approved. If you’ve heard the video where she actually approves it (http://variety.com/2016/music/news/taylor-swift-kanye-kim-kardashian-video-snapchat-famous-lyrics-1201816146/), Taylor ONLY APPROVES THE LINE “Me and Taylor might still have sex,” NOT “I made that bitch famous.” Taylor found it extremely misogynistic and also unfounded considering, she was accepting a VMA when he interrupted her, so clearly she was already famous before then. Even if she did approve the entire line or whatever, it is still misogynistic and it is still a dumb thing to hate Taylor for. That is between Taylor and Kanye. Taylor wouldn’t have been doing anything cruel. The cruel part will always be on Kanye’s side. She just would have been helping that along if she approved all of it. But Kanye, as well as many rappers, is known for his misogynistic lyrics. For no one to call out this 40-year old as immature and cruel is ridiculous, while Taylor gets called out for lying. Really? We all lie. We don’t all bash women in songs that play on the radio for all of our children to hear. 

So, for all of you out there who want to and certainly will continue to hate Taylor Swift for whatever reason, please feel free to let me know what it is you hate about her that I didn’t mention above. 

As much as you hate Taylor Swift, realize that those powers of hate can be used for so much good. Maybe shift to hating white supremacists, racists, neo-nazis, homophobes, and misogynists. 

[scottadamsblog]

A Quick Look at President Trump and the Big Picture

Let’s take a look at the things that are going well for President Trump, and the things that are not, and see if there is a pattern. Here I will include topics that are not necessarily the president’s accomplishments or faults. I’ll simply describe the current state of things.

Things That Are Positive

The economy

Trade deals

China relations

Russia (our frenemy) is working with the U.S. on Syria, North Korea

China is putting pressure on North Korea

Jobs

Healthcare progress (more to do)

Supreme Court nominee confirmed

Tax reform maybe

Optimism for an Israeli-Palestinian “deal”

Safe Zones coming along for Syrian refugees

Illegal immigration down over 70% because of Trump’s persuasion alone.

Business confidence high.

Things that are Negative

Unproven allegations of Russian collusion with Trump campaign.

Trump claims he invented the phrase “prime the pump.”

Trump tweeted a warning that Comey better be careful what he says because he might have been taped in the White House. But such recordings haven’t been confirmed. Or denied.

Critics say Trump is crazy.

Trump claimed his campaign had been “wiretapped” by Obama, but it might have been only incidental surveillance. Or not. We’ll probably never know.

Critics say Trump is a loose cannon.

Critics say “words matter” and Trump is careless with words.

Trump’s approval rating is abysmal.

There is “chaos” in the White House

Trump doesn’t study topics in detail.

Trump might fire people on his staff for various reasons.

There is in-fighting with Trump’s staff.

Trump got two scoops of ice cream when others got one.

Trump threatened to end press briefings but probably didn’t mean it.

Trump is influenced by whoever gives him the latest article that is sometimes fake news.

Trump calls the mainstream media fake news.

Trump has criticized the courts, judges, and anyone else you are not supposed to criticize as a president.

Health care didn’t get passed on the first try. And still needs work.

Trump will be impeached or jailed any day now for whatever.

Trump keeps relying on trusted family advisors such as Jared Kushner and Ivanka.

Trump fired Comey as both sides wanted, but his timing raised suspicions, and he talked about it wrong in an interview. Also didn’t coordinate with his communication staff.

Trump says things that do not pass the fact-checking.

Trump doesn’t realize that his business skills don’t translate into government. (This was the same reason people said he couldn’t win the election.)

Things that Might Be Good or Bad (Depending on your Point of View)

Trump is prioritizing jobs over climate risks in the near term.

Trump is reducing government regulations.

Trump is moving responsibility for several topics to states, per the Constitution.

Did you find the pattern?

All the important stuff is trending positive. Trump is not the sole cause of all that goodness, but he hasn’t broken anything important. That counts too. We’ve had plenty of presidents who broke stuff. Think of Nixon’s price caps, Carter’s hostage rescue mission failure, and Bush-the-younger’s Iraq war. When presidents don’t break anything, that’s a big deal

The topics that are problematic for President Trump include unconfirmed gossip, rumors, fake news, irrational worries, imaginary problems, trivial matters, and simple differences in political priorities. 

As I recently said on Twitter, President Trump’s approval rating is low, but that can be explained two ways. One explanation is that the president is not doing a good job and people can see it with their own eyes. The other explanation is that citizens are actually grading their own cognition and don’t realize it.

What’s it look like to you?

---

You might enjoy reading my book because of patterns.

I’m also on...

Twitter (includes Periscope): @scottadamssays​

YouTube: At this link.

Instagram: ScottAdams925

Facebook Official Page: fb.me/ScottAdamsOfficial

[ajw720]

Confused

I feel I like woke up in OZ. Went to sleep and just woke up to discussions and pics about/with Dianna. One pic claiming she is Mia. And are you betting Mia will sing a Beatles song…where? Sorry if I am being obtuse..maybe I am sicker than I thought! When did Chris talk about  will. I watched his video?????

****

Thank you for the laugh. Yes, often times this maze of deceit and games can certainly feel like we are in a far off land. And the past few days have been one wild ride. Make no mistake about that.  And buckle up, if my theory about WHY this is happening is right, its going to be wild until the end.

The PR article is actually comical and tells you why this is happening. They are seeking promotion for Von Beard.  Plain and Simple.  And this article appeared in some low level, no name “publication” if it is even that. That mistook Beardy for Diana. I mean I don’t know on what planet they look even remotely similar. Perhaps they saw pics of Darren and Diana together, though they looked adorable and that she has to be the gf- and not this other one with whom he has zero chemistry  and zero intimacy, and generally looks like he is in physical pain in her presence? And the blunder was made so much funnier by the fact that Darren was not evn in the pic. Or present that evening   But Chris and Will were!!!!  (After all Darren cannot socially be seen with Chris, the world would have ended that very evening). And Will and Chris are prominently featured on the photo used.  I mean if that is not a glaring sign that everything about these two men are connected, I do not know what is.

As for the Beatles Song, there is a concern, that like Yoko, her talentless self will be included in the band.  No confirmation of that, its pure speculation. IF it happens, think rationally. Darren has kept her professionally off the stage with him for years and years and years. Willing to bet she begged to be in the Listen Up band. So IF and that is IF he brings her on stage, take it for exactly what it is. Promotion of his beard. Her getting whatever she feels the remainder of her contract entitles her too. Which is exposure as a musician. No doubt that was the initial goal, She just realized it was much easier to do nothing and be known as D’s plus 1.  But now that she knows he could literally walk out the door at any moment, she needs a new option to keep her 5 fans happy.

As for Chris, the part of this that just has me shaking my head and laughing. Confirmed on the Sirius XM that he has a bf named Will. An interview taped the same day the posed faker than fake kiss pic was tweeted to the world.  Chris followed that up that interview my talking about his “Amazing Assistant” at AOL Build.  Because he knew that interview would be dropped the next day and he had to wash the bad taste out of his mouth.  No doubt they will now be seeking employment for Will., I guess he no longer wants to be a product but a screenwriter?  I suppose whatever occupation strikes his fancy that particular day,  Or more likely, Chris doesn’t know or care.  The reason for this.  To protect Darren. To pay out Will.  To set up in the end, whenever that is, that Will was and always has been a beard.  And most important, to stand equally with Darren as a united front both shouldering the blame and both having equally lied to their fans about their PR relationships.

[suzannebyrne]

What Is Mariah Carey’s Real Age? We Investigate on Her 48th (or 47th?) Birthday

Is Mariah Carey turning 47 or 48 today? We try to get to the bottom of it. (GIF: Yahoo Celebrity)

Champagne wishes to Mariah Carey on her birthday — only she doesn’t celebrate. “I don’t have a birthday,” she said in an interview last year. “I was just dropped here. It was a fairyland experience.” The star, who has described herself as “eternally 12 years old,” previously explained that her plan is to remain “oblivious to age. Honestly, when you put a number on it yourself, it’s just like, Why? Why do that?”

The diva’s elusiveness about her big day only adds to the mystery surrounding it. Yes, mystery. One of the Internet’s most enduring burning questions is whether Mariah Carey was born on March 27, 1969 or 1970? And people have opinions on the matter, which you can read in revision notes on Mariah’s Wikipedia page and on fan forums. As we started digging into it, we found info pointing to both years, making it easy to understand why the Lambily — Mariah’s fans — have been debating it so heavily.

Not even Mariah Carey’s Wikipedia page has the answer. (Screenshot: Wikipedia)

From what we can decipher, when the “Elusive Chanteuse,” who graduated from Harborfields High School in Greenlawn, NY, in 1987, launched her career (her self-entitled album came out in June 1990), press material must have indicated she was born in 1970, because that is what the New York Times — and other outlets — noted at the time. In an interview on Video Soul soon after her record came out, she said as much. Mariah told Donnie Simpson she was 20 when the record came out and 19 when she recorded it. (Though the fact that she stumbled over her response, seen here at the 2:37 mark, only fuels conspiracy theories.)

However, by January 1991, other reputable outlets like People magazine and the Los Angeles Times were going with a 1969 birth year. (The latter of which used it in a headline: “Mariah Carey Doing OK at 21,” so they were pretty confident they were correct.) Even her hometown paper, Newsday, referred to her as 21 in an article that ran on March 19 of that year, and they had obtained a copy of her senior yearbook and interviewed the vice principal at her school. (Fun fact: Some of Mariah’s likes in 1987 included Corvettes and “guidos.”)

Here’s school girl Mariah as a freshman at Harborfields High School in 1984. (Photo: Seth Poppel/Yearbook Library)

Mariah has fueled the debate herself by avoiding dropping a specific number. At a 2005 party celebrating the release party of the Emancipation of Mimi — and her 35th (or 36th) birthday —  she didn’t utter her actual age, instead telling reporters, “It’s the anniversary of my 12th birthday.” And at the Cannes Film Festival in 2009, someone asked her about how she was feeling about turning 40 earlier that year (going with the 1969 birth year). She implied the reporter was incorrect, saying, “Read my bio again. We can’t allow these lies to spread! Don’t say the F-word around me. It’s just a number but I don’t see why women should have to conform to what is expected of a 40-year-old — whatever that is.”

If you really dig into Mariah Birthday Gate (and we went down that rabbit hole), there is a statement purportedly from a People magazine spokesperson floating around the Internet “verifying” that the star is a 1969 baby in response to fans inquiries about the conflicting info. “We have a copy of Ms. Carey’s driver’s license, which lists her birthday as March 27, 1969. Furthermore, we spoke with the administrators at the high school she attended who confirmed that Ms. Carey’s birthday is March 27, 1969, as did her management when we made our initial interview,” a magazine publicist supposedly said, according to NNDB.com. We were unable to find such a statement on People‘s website, not that it didn’t exist (it could have been in print because they didn’t have website in the early ’90s), and the publicity team for the magazine tells Yahoo “it doesn’t sound familiar at all.” (Despite this, the mag has steadily reported that she was born in 1969 through the years — from here to here.)

There were other things supporting the 1969 theory. One is as simple as her high school graduation date. At the end of the 1987 school year, she’d have pretty much just turned 17 if she was born in 1970, and she’s never said she skipped a grade. In fact, in her 1999 Homecoming special, in which she returned to her alma mater for a concert, made it clear she wasn’t a great student — and her teachers and superintendent verified that. It seems unlikely she’d have graduated a year early.

Mariah — in her senior year at Harborfields in 1987 — did not look young for her grade. However, if she was really born in 1970, she would have turned 17 two months before graduation. (Photo: Seth Poppel/Yearbook Library)

Then there is the matter of the Library of Congress’s Copyright Catalog. If Mariah wasn’t born in 1969, how come her early songs, including “Vision of Love”, which was on her eponymous album, were filed as “Carey, Mariah, 1969-“?

(Screenshot: Library of Congress’s Copyright Catalog)

Also, both Mariah and her director pal, Brett Ratner, have said that they are “born a day apart” — it’s one of the things that makes their bond so strong. His birthday? March 28, 1969. (See 2:25 mark.)

Not so convincing? This photo of Mariah’s “passport” that is all over the web. While it lists her birthday as March 27, 1969, there is nothing we found that leads us to think it’s real. (As in, we haven’t seen it on any reputable sites.)

But there are things that point to Mariah making her grand entrance into the world in 1970 as well. For one, and a good one at that, her mom said — clear as day during a 1999 Oprah interview — that Mariah was born in 1970. (See 2:25 mark.)

Let’s talk about the copies of her 5-year-old twins Monroe and Moroccan’s birth certificates. If they are real — and we guess they are because TMZ’s site TooFab posted them — they have her birthday as 1970. Would Mariah go so far as to falsify legal documents?

And the big bios out there on the superstar — including Mariah Carey Revisited: The Unauthorized Biography by Chris Nickson — list her birth year as 1970. Could they all be wrong?

A page from “Mariah Carey Revisited: The Unauthorized Biography” by Chris Nickson. (Screenshot: Google Books)

We have to admit, our own search to verify her actual birth was frustratingly fruitless — and we can only imagine that Mariah is smiling over it.

We reached out to Mimi’s publicist, who, after our second message, replied to say she was “not sure off hand, sorry!”

We called her high school to try to get her records. That information is “archived” and even if it wasn’t they’d be “unable to give out,” according to the principal’s assistant.

We contacted her former principal, the one who happily appeared in “Homecoming” — and is still a school administrator — but he apparently didn’t want to talk about her this time around because he didn’t get back to us.

We reached out to some of her biographers, who didn’t have anything to add beyond what they wrote in the books years ago.

We requested our own copies of Mariah’s twins birth certificate from the Los Angeles County Registrar — as several fans speculated that the ones on the Internet are fake. It takes “several weeks” to process, so we are holding out for that.

We tried to obtain Mariah’s birth certificate from the Huntington, N.Y. town clerk, but were shot down: “According to NYS Public Health Law, birth certificates can only be given to the party named on the certificate, the party’s parents or documents providing the proper documentation fulfilled by court order,” we were told.

We reached out to the New York State DMV to get a copy of her driving record (including her birthdate), but getting the info for a story “is not a federally-permissible purpose to access personal information held within DMV records.”

We even tweeted her — and used butterflies to get her attention. Nada.

@MariahCarey ????????????What year were you born? Hoping these cute ???????????? inspire you to answer.

— Suzy Byrne (@SuzyByrne) March 22, 2017

We weren’t exaggerating about going down the rabbit hole. The biggest question we have though is why would she lie about her age to begin with? Especially because in 1988 — one year out of high school — she began a relationship with Tommy Mottola, the married record exec, 20 years her senior, who launched her career (and became her first husband). You would think they’d want to pad her age — instead of erase a year from it—  as she was still a teenager. Now that she’s in her late 40s it could make sense to shave off a year (so she’s not that much older than her younger beau Bryan Tanaka), but why do it at 19 or 20?

But let’s be honest, Mariah doesn’t always make sense. This is a woman who wears evening gowns — and shoes — in the bathtub. She works out wearing this. She grocery shops in this. She meets the Head of the United Nations in this. She attends bar mitzvahs in this. Sometimes her thought process seems to be … off-line.

(GIF: Youtube)

It seems likely the explanation is “Mariah Math.” In 2014, she was asked by Out magazine about “Vision of Love” turning 25 years old and she said, “First of all, don’t round up. If you’re going to round, round down!” She continued, “I don’t count years, but I definitely rebuke them — I have anniversaries, not birthdays, because I celebrate life, darling.”

So whether she’s 47 or 48, you can bet Mariah is somewhere celebrating life today. And she should be. However old she is, she still fabulous, dahling.

Read more from Yahoo Celebrity:

Happy 73rd Birthday, Diana Ross!

Sophie Simmons Calls Katey Sagal ‘Low’ for Revealing Dad Gene’s Affair

Val Kilmer’s Twitter Feed Is a Hidden Gem of Bizarre, Star-Studded Stories

[joshuajacksonlyblog]

Coinbase BCash Scandal: Ver Says Insider Trading A ‘Non-Crime’

Bitcoin.com owner and Bitcoin Cash (BCash) proponent Roger Ver has described Coinbase’s insider trading scandal as a “non-crime.”

Ver: Advance Trading Would Have Been Better

Speaking in a new interview with CNBC, which this week also came under scrutiny for its sudden BCash support, Ver implied it was up to users to “be careful” when using cryptocurrency exchanges.

“I think insider trading is a non-crime… If a bunch of people had traded in advance, then the price wouldn’t have been nearly as volatile,” he told hosts including pro-Bitcoin Brian Kelly.

Ver’s previous appearance on the network ignited a storm on social media, with figures such as Max Keiser opposing the network’s choice of guest for mainstream viewers. Keiser described BCash as “borderline fraud” and CNBC as “fake news.”

Responding to Kelly’s query as to whether BCash’s increased popularity would cause it the same challenges as Bitcoin currently faces, Ver continued that bigger blocks would avoid issues such as network congestion.

Reddit User Says ‘Mate At Coinbase’ Confirmed BCash Launch

Yet the ties between Ver and the media giant run deeper.

As Bitcoinist reported Wednesday, an out-of-character spate of pro-BCash tweets from CNBC revealed the work of Gaby and Paul Wasenstein, a husband-wife team which worked both as its director of marketing and organized BCash events.

A photograph of Paul Wasenstein with Ver holding a CNBC logo has been circulating around cryptocurrency social media circles.

Predictably, the backlash from Bitcoin users angered by the sudden BCash promotion continues to mount.

Slush, creator of the first Bitcoin mining pool and Trezor hardware wallet  CEO, wrote on Twitter that the matter of BCash, along with the ongoing insider trading scandal at Coinbase, was a “decentralization matter.”

1) Conbase was never a bitcoin company. They'll sell you whatever will make them a profit.

2) Bcash is a centralized scam, designed to overtake success of Bitcoin by using propaganda to confuse newcomers.

Decentralization matter. Avoid both.

— slush (@slushcz) December 20, 2017

“Avoid both,” he added, with ShapeShift CEO Erik Voorhees describing his own objections as “politicized propaganda.”

On Coinbase’s promised investigation into the insider trading, analyst Tone Vays meanwhile unearthed what he considers evidence staff broke rules about BCash prior to the release.

Sooooo, "Insider Trading" Investigator over? Thanks @lordoftrade and other twitter detectives for breaking this one wide open… someone should send a message to @BBC @BBCBreaking so they can update the article IFTTT

[myeclecticcollectorblazeus]

In the Oval Office, an annoyed President Donald Trump ended an argument he was having with his aides. He reached into a drawer, took out his iPhone and threw it on top of the historic Resolute Desk:"Do you want me to settle this right now?"There was no missing Trump's threat that day in early 2017, the aides recalled. With a tweet, he could fling a directive to the world, and there was nothing they could do about it.When Trump entered office, Twitter was a political tool that had helped get him elected and a digital howitzer that he relished firing. In the years since, he has fully integrated Twitter into the very fabric of his administration, reshaping the nature of the presidency and presidential power.After Turkey invaded northern Syria this past month, he crafted his response not only in White House meetings but also in a series of contradictory tweets. This summer, he announced increased tariffs on $300 billion worth of Chinese goods, using a tweet to deepen tensions between the two countries. And in March, Trump cast aside more than 50 years of U.S. policy, tweeting his recognition of Israel's sovereignty in the Golan Heights. He openly delighted in the reaction he provoked."Boom. I press it," Trump recalled months later at a White House conference attended by conservative social media personalities, "and, within two seconds, 'We have breaking news.'"Early on, top aides wanted to restrain the president's Twitter habit, even considering asking the company to impose a 15-minute delay on Trump's messages. But 11,390 presidential tweets later, many administration officials and lawmakers embrace his Twitter obsession, flocking to his social media chief with suggestions. Policy meetings are hijacked when Trump gets an idea for a tweet, drawing in cabinet members and others for wordsmithing. And as a president often at war with his own bureaucracy, he deploys Twitter to break through logjams, overrule or humiliate recalcitrant advisers and preempt his staff."He needs to tweet like we need to eat," Kellyanne Conway, his White House counselor, said in an interview.In a presidency unlike any other, where Trump wakes to Twitter, goes to bed with it and is comforted by how much it revolves around him, the person he most often singled out for praise was himself -- more than 2,000 times, according to an analysis by The New York Times.The Times examined Trump's use of Twitter since taking office, reviewing all his tweets, retweets and followers and interviewing nearly 50 current and former administration officials, lawmakers and Twitter executives and employees. What has emerged is a rich account, with new analysis, previously unreported episodes and fresh details of how the president exploits the platform to exert power.It is often by brute repetition. He has taken to Twitter to demand action 1,159 times on immigration and his border wall, a top priority, and 521 times on tariffs, another key agenda item. Twitter is an instrument of his foreign policy: He has praised dictators more than a hundred times, while complaining nearly twice as much about the U.S.' traditional allies. Twitter is the Trump administration's de facto personnel office: The chief executive has announced the departures of more than two dozen top officials, some fired by tweet.More than half of the president's posts -- 5,889 -- have been attacks; no other category even comes close. His targets include the Russia investigation, a Federal Reserve that won't bow to his whims, previous administrations, entire cities that are led by Democrats, and adversaries from outspoken athletes to chief executives who displease him. Like no other modern president, Trump has publicly harangued businesses to advance his political goals and silence criticism, often with talk of government intervention. Using Twitter, he threatened "Saturday Night Live" with an investigation by the Federal Communications Commission and accused Amazon, led by Jeff Bezos, owner of The Washington Post, of cheating the U.S. Postal Service.As much as anything, Twitter is the broadcast network for Trump's parallel political reality -- the "alternative facts" he has used to spread conspiracy theories, fake information and extremist content, including material that energizes some of his base.Trump's use of Twitter has accelerated sharply since the end of the special counsel's Russia investigation and reached a new high as Democrats opened an impeachment inquiry, the analysis shows. He tweeted more than 500 times during the first two weeks of October, a pace that put him on track to triple his monthly average. (The Times analyzed Trump's tweets through Oct. 15. The total by the end of the month reached 11,887.)His more than 66 million Twitter followers have become his private polling service, offering what he sees as validation for his performance in office. But fewer than one-fifth of his followers are voting-age Americans, according to a Times analysis of Pew Research national surveys of adults who use Twitter.The White House press office declined to comment for this article and turned down an interview request with the president. Now, as Trump anticipates a bitter reelection battle and faces an impeachment inquiry by Democrats, the stakes are higher than ever before, and Twitter even more central to his presidency.His top campaign aides are embracing the outrage that Trump stirs with his tweets to reinforce his anti-establishment brand and strengthen his bond with the fiercely loyal supporters who propelled him into office. And as public backing for impeachment grows, the president is using the platform to build a defensive echo chamber.While people around Trump acknowledge that his tweets can cause political damage, the president is confident in his mastery of Twitter.This past week, as he announced that U.S. Special Forces had killed Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, leader of the Islamic State, Trump noted the terror group's digital prowess. "They use the internet better than almost anybody in the world," he said. "Perhaps other than Donald Trump."Policy Via TwitterWith a single tweet last fall, Trump sent his administration into a tailspin. "I must, in the strongest of terms, ask Mexico to stop this onslaught," he wrote in October 2018, angry about a caravan of migrants from Central America. "If unable to do so I will call up the U.S. Military and CLOSE OUR SOUTHERN BORDER!"Trump's aides had tried for weeks to talk him out of shutting down the border; the logistics would be impossible and the economic pain extreme. The tweet prompted an emergency meeting down the hall from the Oval Office as aides scrambled to head off Trump's impulse, according to people familiar with the frantic scene. Like others in this article, they spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of angering the president.The aides succeeded in temporarily holding him off, but the tweet crystallized for cautious bureaucrats exactly what he wanted: to stop people from coming into the country. In the months that followed, Trump's threat helped to set off an effort inside the government to find ever more restrictive ways to block immigrants. Nearly six months later, Kirstjen Nielsen, homeland security secretary, was still trying to prevent a border shutdown when the president brought her resistance to an end."Kirstjen Nielsen," he tweeted, "will be leaving her position."This is governing in the Trump era. For President Barack Obama, a tweet about a presidential proposal might mark the conclusion of a long, deliberative process. For Trump, Twitter is often the beginning of how policy is made."Suddenly there's a tweet, and everything gets upended, and you spent the week trying to defend something else," said Rep. Peter King, R-N.Y. "This person thrives on chaos. What we may find disconcerting or upsetting or whatever, it is actually what keeps him going."In October 2017, Rex Tillerson, the president's first secretary of state, was in China with a team of diplomats negotiating sanctions on Kim Jong Un, the North Korean leader, when Trump weighed in on Twitter. Tillerson was "wasting his time trying to negotiate with Little Rocket Man," he wrote. "Save your energy Rex, we'll do what has to be done!"Two months later, a Reuters headline blared that Mick Mulvaney, who then was Trump's new pick to lead the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, had decided to put "on ice" sanctions against Wells Fargo for consumer abuses. It was little surprise: Mulvaney was an ally of the financial industry. But Trump had other ideas."Fines and penalties against Wells Fargo Bank for their bad acts against their customers and others will not be dropped, as has incorrectly been reported, but will be pursued and, if anything, substantially increased," he tweeted.Political appointees at the bureau wanted to affirm Trump's desire publicly, despite long-standing policies against commenting on active investigations, according to former officials there. A spokesman for Mulvaney issued a statement saying only that he "shares the president's firm commitment to punishing bad actors and protecting American consumers."According to two people with direct knowledge of the Wells Fargo inquiry, career bureau officials took Trump's outburst as a green light to pursue aggressive negotiations with the bank, even as Mulvaney's team prepared to dial back penalties in other cases or shelve them. Wells Fargo ultimately agreed to a billion-dollar federal settlement, the bureau's largest-ever civil penalty.Over time, Trump has turned Twitter into a means of presidential communication as vital as a statement from the White House press secretary or an Oval Office address. The press secretary has not held a daily on-camera press briefing -- a decadeslong ritual of presidential messaging -- since March. Instead, Trump's Twitter activity drives the day.And Trump has removed any doubt that his tweets carry the weight once reserved for more formal pronouncements.In summer 2018, his aides repeatedly tried to reassure Republican lawmakers that the president backed their hard-line immigration bill, despite his remarks suggesting otherwise. But privately, Trump told several senators that there was only one certain sign of his support."If I don't tweet it," he said, according to two former senior advisers, "don't listen to my staff."Adapting a PlatformWhen Trump entered office, aides were determined to rein in his itchy Twitter fingers.In a series of informal conversations in early 2017, top White House officials discussed the possibility of a 15-minute delay on the president's account, a technical change not unlike the five-second naughty-word system used by television networks. But, one former senior official said, they quickly abandoned the idea after recognizing the political peril if it leaked to the press -- or to their boss.Several weeks later, a trio of close advisers presented Trump with another idea. Gary Cohn, the top economic adviser; Hope Hicks, the president's director of strategic communications; and Rob Porter, his staff secretary, argued that they should see the tweets before he sent them out.Trump was skeptical, worrying that delayed tweets would be irrelevant, according to a former White House official. But he agreed to a weeklong trial. Within 72 hours, the president had resumed tweeting from his golf club in Bedminster, New Jersey.Three thousand miles away, in Silicon Valley, similar conversations were unfolding at Twitter's offices, where executives faced the same dilemma as Trump's inner circle: whether, and how, to restrain him.At the time, Twitter lagged far behind larger competitors like Facebook. While popular among politicians and journalists, it was struggling financially. But the president's incessant tweeting gave the company more currency.His Twitter account often drove more "impressions" -- a key company metric -- than any other in the world. But some of his messages seemed to violate the company's policies against abuse and incitement.On a now-defunct internal company message board known as Twitter Buzz, some left-leaning employees favored barring the president. Trump's behavior came up at almost every all-hands gathering and at many smaller meetings of executives. Some of them had set their phones to alert them whenever the president tweeted, according to a former employee who spoke on the condition of confidentiality."What I saw was a company coming to grips with an entirely new situation, a new level of scrutiny, a new level of vitriol," said Dianna Colasurdo, a former account executive on Twitter's political advertising sales team, "and working to adapt their policies in the moment to align with that."A turning point came in fall 2017, at the height of tensions with North Korea, when Trump tweeted that the rogue nation might not "be around much longer!" The country's foreign minister called that a declaration of war. On Twitter, users wondered if the company would allow Trump to tweet his way into a nuclear conflict.The response came the next day. Referring back to Trump's online declaration, Twitter announced in a tweet that it took "newsworthiness" into account when evaluating whether to remove a post that violated its policies.In an interview, Twitter executives said that newsworthiness had long figured into the company's internal enforcement guidelines and that officials there had been formulating the announcement, which applied worldwide, months before Trump's North Korea tweet. But former employees said they understood the announcement to be Trump-driven. Twitter did not want to be in the business of censoring the president.Late in summer 2018, White House insiders tried again to curb Trump's use of social media, according to two former aides. After a series of over-the-top weeks of tweeting -- including calling Omarosa Manigault Newman, his onetime aide, "wacky" and "a lowlife" -- several advisers suggested he go just two days without Twitter and see what happened. Trump nodded and then promptly discarded the advice.King, who said most of his Republican colleagues wished the president would tweet less, added that whenever he had raised the issue with White House staff members, they shrugged helplessly."It's not going to stop," he recalled their saying. "Forget it; we've all tried."Soon enough, Trump was as prolific as ever.On Sept. 13, he mocked Jamie Dimon, chief executive of JPMorgan Chase, for claiming he could beat Trump in an election. "He doesn't have the aptitude or 'smarts' & is a poor public speaker & nervous mess," the president tweeted. Over the next 12 hours, Trump attacked two former FBI officials, accused The Wall Street Journal of getting a tariff story wrong and blasted former Secretary of State John Kerry for holding "illegal meetings" with Iran."BAD!" he wrote.First Things FirstTrump's Twitter habit is most intense in the morning, when he is in the White House residence, watching Fox News, scrolling through his Twitter mentions and turning the social media platform into what one aide called the "ultimate weapon of mass dissemination."Of the attack tweets identified in the Times analysis, nearly half were sent between 6 a.m. and 10 a.m., hours that Trump spends mostly without advisers present.After waking early, Trump typically watches news shows recorded the previous night on his "Super TiVo," several DVRs connected to a single remote. (The devices are set to record "Lou Dobbs Tonight" on Fox Business Network; "Hannity," "Tucker Carlson Tonight" and "The Story With Martha MacCallum" on Fox News; and "Anderson Cooper 360" on CNN.)He takes in those shows and the "Fox & Friends" morning program, then flings out comments on his iPhone. Then he watches as his tweets reverberate on cable channels and news sites.Early on Sept. 2 -- the start of a week in which he tweeted 198 times -- the president sent a few benign tweets, then lashed out at Paul Krugman as a "Failing New York Times columnist" who "never got it!" Over the next 44 minutes, he fired off 10 more tweets. He disparaged Richard Trumka, president of the AFL-CIO ("Likes what we are doing until the cameras go on.") He called James Comey, the former FBI director, and his "dwindling group of friends" liars and traitors. He railed against The Washington Post and four women of color in Congress who called themselves "the Squad."Almost every morning that week, Trump kicked off the day with an attack on one critic or another: the "incompetent Mayor of London," or "Bad 'actress' Debra The Mess Messing" -- whom he accused of being racist -- or the "Fake News Media." He referred to conservative media outlets 45 times, berated the mainstream media 32 times and tweeted about conspiracy theories 12 times.Sometimes the president's apparent fury on Twitter is meant to troll his critics and get a rise out of them, many of his closest aides said. But they still brace themselves, knowing that they are likely to be blindsided by one of his tweets. Aides who gather for the early-morning staff meetings in the West Wing said their agenda was regularly blown up when their phones simultaneously went off with a tweet from the boss.Once Trump arrives in the West Wing -- usually after 10 a.m. -- Dan Scavino, White House social media director, takes control of the Twitter account, tweeting as @realDonaldTrump from his own phone or computer. Trump rarely tweets in front of others, those close to him said, because he does not like to wear the reading glasses he needs to see the screen.Instead, the president dictates tweets to Scavino, who sits in a closet-size room just off the Oval Office until Trump calls out "Scavino!" Often, he prints out suggested tweets in extra-large fonts for the president to sign off on. (A single-page article that Scavino recently printed out for him ran to six pages after the fonts were enlarged, according to one person who saw it.)Scavino's role in Trump's Twitter machine has made him an unlikely White House power broker and the go-to person for aides, business executives, friends and lawmakers who want the president to tweet something. Conway noted what she called the hypocrisy of many Republicans who begged her to get Trump to stop tweeting during the 2016 campaign and now come to Scavino with suggestions. Scavino declined to be interviewed for this article.He sometimes acts as a brake -- or tries to -- on the president's tweeting impulses. When Trump started angrily posting about the "Squad," Scavino told him it was a bad idea, according to an aide who witnessed the conversation. Along with Michael Dubke, who served as White House communications director for several months in 2017 and is from Buffalo, New York, home of the famous chicken wings, Scavino presented some tweets to Trump in degrees of outrageousness: "hot," "medium" or "mild." Trump, said one former official who saw the proposed messages, always picked the most incendiary ones and often wanted to make them even more provocative.And while many of Trump's tweets are shoot-from-the-hip attacks, he chews over others for days or even weeks, waiting for just the right moment to maximize the reaction, aides said.He plotted for days to tweet about Mika Brzezinski, liberal co-host of the popular MSNBC morning program, according to former White House officials, before finally posting one morning in June 2017. He called her "low I.Q. Crazy Mika" and wrote that she had been "bleeding badly from a face-lift" during a New Year's Eve party.In October of last year, the president started telling his aides that he planned to denounce Stormy Daniels, a pornographic-film actress who claimed to have had an affair with him more than a decade earlier. He said he wanted to call her a "horse face."Several current and former aides recalled telling Trump that it was a terrible idea and would renew accusations of misogyny against him. But he persisted.Finally, after watching a Fox News report days later about how a federal judge had thrown out a lawsuit by Daniels, the president tapped out the tweet."Great, now I can go after Horseface and her 3rd rate lawyer in the Great State of Texas," he wrote.A Love of 'Likes'For Trump, Twitter reinforces his instincts about his performance as president.After a rally in Dallas in mid-October, Trump's aides prepared a large-type printout of tweets gushing over his speech that day, including one from Tomi Lahren, a Fox News commentator and host of a show on the Fox Nation site. Trump scrawled a thank-you note on one copy to Lahren -- who then tweeted a picture of the letter back at the president.Aides said they often compiled positive feedback for Trump. He revels in the stream of praise from his most loyal followers on paper or as he scrolls through his phone early in the morning and late at night. He considers his following to be like the ratings on a TV show, better than any approval poll. After one weekend Twitter spree, the president told Sarah Huckabee Sanders, his press secretary at the time, he had expected a tweet he was particularly proud of to get more response than it did, according to a former administration official. Sanders said that if he tweeted 60 times, people wouldn't pay as much attention, the official said.The president is keenly aware of his number of followers and reluctant to acknowledge that any of them are not real. Trump has accused Twitter of political bias for its periodic purges of bot accounts across the platform, which have cost him -- and other prominent users -- hundreds of thousands of followers. When he met with the company's chief executive, Jack Dorsey, in April, Trump reportedly pressed him at length about the lost followers.There is plenty of evidence that Trump's Twitter following may not be a reliable proxy for what the American people think of the job he is doing.It is difficult, if not impossible, to determine with certainty how many of Trump's more than 66 million followers are fake. Some studies of his followers have estimated that a high proportion are likely to be automated bots, fake accounts or inactive. But even a conservative analysis by the Times found that nearly a third of them, about 22 million, included no biographical information and used the service's default profile image -- two signs the accounts may be rarely used or inactive. Fourteen percent have automatically generated user names, another indication that an account may not belong to a real person.Even if Trump is not shouting into the void on Twitter, he is often preaching to the converted. Data from Stirista, an analytics firm, shows that his followers tend to be the kind of users who are most likely to be his supporters -- disproportionately older, white and male compared with Twitter users overall.And they constitute just a fraction of the electorate. According to the Times analysis of Pew data, only about 4% of American adults, or about 11 million people, follow him on Twitter. Those followers represent less that one-fifth of his total, the analysis shows.According to data from YouGov, which polls about most of the president's tweets, some of the topics on which Trump got the most likes and retweets -- jabs at the NFL, posts about the special counsel's investigation, unfounded allegations of widespread voter fraud -- poll poorly with the general public.But people close to Trump said there was no dissuading him that the "likes" a tweet got were evidence that a decision or policy proposal was well received.Last December, after Trump announced plans to withdraw some troops from Syria, lawmakers came to the White House to argue against it. According to Politico, Trump responded by calling in Scavino."Tell them how popular my policy is," Trump asked Scavino, who described for the lawmakers social media postings that had praised Trump's decision. Aides said that for Trump, his Twitter "likes" were proof that he had made the right call.The reaction in the outside world was far less favorable. Within weeks, Trump's defense secretary and the special anti-ISIS envoy quit over the decision. U.S. allies were enraged. More than two-thirds of the Senate voted to rebuke Trump, who agreed under pressure to keep the troops in Syria.Almost a year later, U.S. troops in Syria became an issue again after Trump appeared to give President Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey a green light to invade Kurdish-controlled areas in northern Syria.That resulted in another congressional rebuke for Trump and complaints even from loyal Republican allies. In subsequent days, Trump sought to defend himself on Twitter, alternately denying he had abandoned the Kurds and suggesting the United States had no stake in their safety, threatening Erdogan if the incursion continued and praising Turkey as an important trading partner.Many people took note of the back-and-forth, including Erdogan. "When we take a look at Mr. Trump's Twitter posts, we can no longer follow them," the Turkish president told reporters mockingly in mid-October, according to Hurriyet, a Turkish newspaper. "We cannot keep track."A Tool for ReelectionIn the months ahead, the man tasked with winning Trump a second term is hoping to focus the president's Twitter habit on its original purpose: connecting with voters.Brad Parscale, who served as Trump's digital director in 2016 and is now campaign manager, has worked closely with Scavino to shape perceptions of the president through social media. The two men speak a half-dozen times a day, according to people familiar with their interactions.Parscale criticized Twitter after it announced Wednesday that it would no longer allow paid political advertising on the platform, calling it "yet another attempt to silence conservatives." But the change may benefit Trump: He has a far larger organic Twitter following than any of his likely Democratic opponents and is therefore less reliant on paid ads to spread his message through the platform.While some campaign aides said Trump's tweets can be a distraction, they also view Twitter as an essential tool to present him as someone strong, willing to stand up to so-called political elites and what the president recently called the "unholy alliance of corrupt Democrat politicians, deep-state bureaucrats and the fake-news media."The aides seek to cultivate the image of a man who understands "regular people." Trump's team believes that his unvarnished writing, poor punctuation and increasing profanity on Twitter signals authenticity -- a contrast to the polished, vetted, often anodyne social media style of most candidates.Twitter, Conway said, is the president's most potent weapon when it comes to bypassing the powerful people he believes have controlled the flow of information too long."It's the democratization of information," she said. Everyone receives Trump's tweets at once -- the stay-at-home mom, the plumber working on the sink, the billionaire executive, the White House correspondent."They all hear 'ping,'" she said, "at the same time."----MethodologyThe New York Times reviewed every tweet and retweet sent by President Donald Trump from Jan. 20, 2017, through Oct. 15, 2019. Each one was evaluated and tagged for several factors: whether it included an attack or praise; who or what was attacked or praised; and for topics including trade, immigration, the military, the economy, the 2018 midterm elections, the Russia investigation and the House impeachment inquiry. In the Times analysis, retweets in each of those categories were counted as tweets.The Times reviewed each Twitter account that followed Trump by analyzing profile information, tweet frequency and the date the account was created. The Times also used data from Pew Research to estimate how many American adults follow Trump on Twitter. Pew Research conducted a nationally representative sample of American adults with personal, public Twitter accounts to analyze how many follow American politicians.This article originally appeared in The New York Times.(C) 2019 The New York Times Company

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In the Oval Office, an annoyed President Donald Trump ended an argument he was having with his aides. He reached into a drawer, took out his iPhone and threw it on top of the historic Resolute Desk:"Do you want me to settle this right now?"There was no missing Trump's threat that day in early 2017, the aides recalled. With a tweet, he could fling a directive to the world, and there was nothing they could do about it.When Trump entered office, Twitter was a political tool that had helped get him elected and a digital howitzer that he relished firing. In the years since, he has fully integrated Twitter into the very fabric of his administration, reshaping the nature of the presidency and presidential power.After Turkey invaded northern Syria this past month, he crafted his response not only in White House meetings but also in a series of contradictory tweets. This summer, he announced increased tariffs on $300 billion worth of Chinese goods, using a tweet to deepen tensions between the two countries. And in March, Trump cast aside more than 50 years of U.S. policy, tweeting his recognition of Israel's sovereignty in the Golan Heights. He openly delighted in the reaction he provoked."Boom. I press it," Trump recalled months later at a White House conference attended by conservative social media personalities, "and, within two seconds, 'We have breaking news.'"Early on, top aides wanted to restrain the president's Twitter habit, even considering asking the company to impose a 15-minute delay on Trump's messages. But 11,390 presidential tweets later, many administration officials and lawmakers embrace his Twitter obsession, flocking to his social media chief with suggestions. Policy meetings are hijacked when Trump gets an idea for a tweet, drawing in cabinet members and others for wordsmithing. And as a president often at war with his own bureaucracy, he deploys Twitter to break through logjams, overrule or humiliate recalcitrant advisers and preempt his staff."He needs to tweet like we need to eat," Kellyanne Conway, his White House counselor, said in an interview.In a presidency unlike any other, where Trump wakes to Twitter, goes to bed with it and is comforted by how much it revolves around him, the person he most often singled out for praise was himself -- more than 2,000 times, according to an analysis by The New York Times.The Times examined Trump's use of Twitter since taking office, reviewing all his tweets, retweets and followers and interviewing nearly 50 current and former administration officials, lawmakers and Twitter executives and employees. What has emerged is a rich account, with new analysis, previously unreported episodes and fresh details of how the president exploits the platform to exert power.It is often by brute repetition. He has taken to Twitter to demand action 1,159 times on immigration and his border wall, a top priority, and 521 times on tariffs, another key agenda item. Twitter is an instrument of his foreign policy: He has praised dictators more than a hundred times, while complaining nearly twice as much about the U.S.' traditional allies. Twitter is the Trump administration's de facto personnel office: The chief executive has announced the departures of more than two dozen top officials, some fired by tweet.More than half of the president's posts -- 5,889 -- have been attacks; no other category even comes close. His targets include the Russia investigation, a Federal Reserve that won't bow to his whims, previous administrations, entire cities that are led by Democrats, and adversaries from outspoken athletes to chief executives who displease him. Like no other modern president, Trump has publicly harangued businesses to advance his political goals and silence criticism, often with talk of government intervention. Using Twitter, he threatened "Saturday Night Live" with an investigation by the Federal Communications Commission and accused Amazon, led by Jeff Bezos, owner of The Washington Post, of cheating the U.S. Postal Service.As much as anything, Twitter is the broadcast network for Trump's parallel political reality -- the "alternative facts" he has used to spread conspiracy theories, fake information and extremist content, including material that energizes some of his base.Trump's use of Twitter has accelerated sharply since the end of the special counsel's Russia investigation and reached a new high as Democrats opened an impeachment inquiry, the analysis shows. He tweeted more than 500 times during the first two weeks of October, a pace that put him on track to triple his monthly average. (The Times analyzed Trump's tweets through Oct. 15. The total by the end of the month reached 11,887.)His more than 66 million Twitter followers have become his private polling service, offering what he sees as validation for his performance in office. But fewer than one-fifth of his followers are voting-age Americans, according to a Times analysis of Pew Research national surveys of adults who use Twitter.The White House press office declined to comment for this article and turned down an interview request with the president. Now, as Trump anticipates a bitter reelection battle and faces an impeachment inquiry by Democrats, the stakes are higher than ever before, and Twitter even more central to his presidency.His top campaign aides are embracing the outrage that Trump stirs with his tweets to reinforce his anti-establishment brand and strengthen his bond with the fiercely loyal supporters who propelled him into office. And as public backing for impeachment grows, the president is using the platform to build a defensive echo chamber.While people around Trump acknowledge that his tweets can cause political damage, the president is confident in his mastery of Twitter.This past week, as he announced that U.S. Special Forces had killed Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, leader of the Islamic State, Trump noted the terror group's digital prowess. "They use the internet better than almost anybody in the world," he said. "Perhaps other than Donald Trump."Policy Via TwitterWith a single tweet last fall, Trump sent his administration into a tailspin. "I must, in the strongest of terms, ask Mexico to stop this onslaught," he wrote in October 2018, angry about a caravan of migrants from Central America. "If unable to do so I will call up the U.S. Military and CLOSE OUR SOUTHERN BORDER!"Trump's aides had tried for weeks to talk him out of shutting down the border; the logistics would be impossible and the economic pain extreme. The tweet prompted an emergency meeting down the hall from the Oval Office as aides scrambled to head off Trump's impulse, according to people familiar with the frantic scene. Like others in this article, they spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of angering the president.The aides succeeded in temporarily holding him off, but the tweet crystallized for cautious bureaucrats exactly what he wanted: to stop people from coming into the country. In the months that followed, Trump's threat helped to set off an effort inside the government to find ever more restrictive ways to block immigrants. Nearly six months later, Kirstjen Nielsen, homeland security secretary, was still trying to prevent a border shutdown when the president brought her resistance to an end."Kirstjen Nielsen," he tweeted, "will be leaving her position."This is governing in the Trump era. For President Barack Obama, a tweet about a presidential proposal might mark the conclusion of a long, deliberative process. For Trump, Twitter is often the beginning of how policy is made."Suddenly there's a tweet, and everything gets upended, and you spent the week trying to defend something else," said Rep. Peter King, R-N.Y. "This person thrives on chaos. What we may find disconcerting or upsetting or whatever, it is actually what keeps him going."In October 2017, Rex Tillerson, the president's first secretary of state, was in China with a team of diplomats negotiating sanctions on Kim Jong Un, the North Korean leader, when Trump weighed in on Twitter. Tillerson was "wasting his time trying to negotiate with Little Rocket Man," he wrote. "Save your energy Rex, we'll do what has to be done!"Two months later, a Reuters headline blared that Mick Mulvaney, who then was Trump's new pick to lead the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, had decided to put "on ice" sanctions against Wells Fargo for consumer abuses. It was little surprise: Mulvaney was an ally of the financial industry. But Trump had other ideas."Fines and penalties against Wells Fargo Bank for their bad acts against their customers and others will not be dropped, as has incorrectly been reported, but will be pursued and, if anything, substantially increased," he tweeted.Political appointees at the bureau wanted to affirm Trump's desire publicly, despite long-standing policies against commenting on active investigations, according to former officials there. A spokesman for Mulvaney issued a statement saying only that he "shares the president's firm commitment to punishing bad actors and protecting American consumers."According to two people with direct knowledge of the Wells Fargo inquiry, career bureau officials took Trump's outburst as a green light to pursue aggressive negotiations with the bank, even as Mulvaney's team prepared to dial back penalties in other cases or shelve them. Wells Fargo ultimately agreed to a billion-dollar federal settlement, the bureau's largest-ever civil penalty.Over time, Trump has turned Twitter into a means of presidential communication as vital as a statement from the White House press secretary or an Oval Office address. The press secretary has not held a daily on-camera press briefing -- a decadeslong ritual of presidential messaging -- since March. Instead, Trump's Twitter activity drives the day.And Trump has removed any doubt that his tweets carry the weight once reserved for more formal pronouncements.In summer 2018, his aides repeatedly tried to reassure Republican lawmakers that the president backed their hard-line immigration bill, despite his remarks suggesting otherwise. But privately, Trump told several senators that there was only one certain sign of his support."If I don't tweet it," he said, according to two former senior advisers, "don't listen to my staff."Adapting a PlatformWhen Trump entered office, aides were determined to rein in his itchy Twitter fingers.In a series of informal conversations in early 2017, top White House officials discussed the possibility of a 15-minute delay on the president's account, a technical change not unlike the five-second naughty-word system used by television networks. But, one former senior official said, they quickly abandoned the idea after recognizing the political peril if it leaked to the press -- or to their boss.Several weeks later, a trio of close advisers presented Trump with another idea. Gary Cohn, the top economic adviser; Hope Hicks, the president's director of strategic communications; and Rob Porter, his staff secretary, argued that they should see the tweets before he sent them out.Trump was skeptical, worrying that delayed tweets would be irrelevant, according to a former White House official. But he agreed to a weeklong trial. Within 72 hours, the president had resumed tweeting from his golf club in Bedminster, New Jersey.Three thousand miles away, in Silicon Valley, similar conversations were unfolding at Twitter's offices, where executives faced the same dilemma as Trump's inner circle: whether, and how, to restrain him.At the time, Twitter lagged far behind larger competitors like Facebook. While popular among politicians and journalists, it was struggling financially. But the president's incessant tweeting gave the company more currency.His Twitter account often drove more "impressions" -- a key company metric -- than any other in the world. But some of his messages seemed to violate the company's policies against abuse and incitement.On a now-defunct internal company message board known as Twitter Buzz, some left-leaning employees favored barring the president. Trump's behavior came up at almost every all-hands gathering and at many smaller meetings of executives. Some of them had set their phones to alert them whenever the president tweeted, according to a former employee who spoke on the condition of confidentiality."What I saw was a company coming to grips with an entirely new situation, a new level of scrutiny, a new level of vitriol," said Dianna Colasurdo, a former account executive on Twitter's political advertising sales team, "and working to adapt their policies in the moment to align with that."A turning point came in fall 2017, at the height of tensions with North Korea, when Trump tweeted that the rogue nation might not "be around much longer!" The country's foreign minister called that a declaration of war. On Twitter, users wondered if the company would allow Trump to tweet his way into a nuclear conflict.The response came the next day. Referring back to Trump's online declaration, Twitter announced in a tweet that it took "newsworthiness" into account when evaluating whether to remove a post that violated its policies.In an interview, Twitter executives said that newsworthiness had long figured into the company's internal enforcement guidelines and that officials there had been formulating the announcement, which applied worldwide, months before Trump's North Korea tweet. But former employees said they understood the announcement to be Trump-driven. Twitter did not want to be in the business of censoring the president.Late in summer 2018, White House insiders tried again to curb Trump's use of social media, according to two former aides. After a series of over-the-top weeks of tweeting -- including calling Omarosa Manigault Newman, his onetime aide, "wacky" and "a lowlife" -- several advisers suggested he go just two days without Twitter and see what happened. Trump nodded and then promptly discarded the advice.King, who said most of his Republican colleagues wished the president would tweet less, added that whenever he had raised the issue with White House staff members, they shrugged helplessly."It's not going to stop," he recalled their saying. "Forget it; we've all tried."Soon enough, Trump was as prolific as ever.On Sept. 13, he mocked Jamie Dimon, chief executive of JPMorgan Chase, for claiming he could beat Trump in an election. "He doesn't have the aptitude or 'smarts' & is a poor public speaker & nervous mess," the president tweeted. Over the next 12 hours, Trump attacked two former FBI officials, accused The Wall Street Journal of getting a tariff story wrong and blasted former Secretary of State John Kerry for holding "illegal meetings" with Iran."BAD!" he wrote.First Things FirstTrump's Twitter habit is most intense in the morning, when he is in the White House residence, watching Fox News, scrolling through his Twitter mentions and turning the social media platform into what one aide called the "ultimate weapon of mass dissemination."Of the attack tweets identified in the Times analysis, nearly half were sent between 6 a.m. and 10 a.m., hours that Trump spends mostly without advisers present.After waking early, Trump typically watches news shows recorded the previous night on his "Super TiVo," several DVRs connected to a single remote. (The devices are set to record "Lou Dobbs Tonight" on Fox Business Network; "Hannity," "Tucker Carlson Tonight" and "The Story With Martha MacCallum" on Fox News; and "Anderson Cooper 360" on CNN.)He takes in those shows and the "Fox & Friends" morning program, then flings out comments on his iPhone. Then he watches as his tweets reverberate on cable channels and news sites.Early on Sept. 2 -- the start of a week in which he tweeted 198 times -- the president sent a few benign tweets, then lashed out at Paul Krugman as a "Failing New York Times columnist" who "never got it!" Over the next 44 minutes, he fired off 10 more tweets. He disparaged Richard Trumka, president of the AFL-CIO ("Likes what we are doing until the cameras go on.") He called James Comey, the former FBI director, and his "dwindling group of friends" liars and traitors. He railed against The Washington Post and four women of color in Congress who called themselves "the Squad."Almost every morning that week, Trump kicked off the day with an attack on one critic or another: the "incompetent Mayor of London," or "Bad 'actress' Debra The Mess Messing" -- whom he accused of being racist -- or the "Fake News Media." He referred to conservative media outlets 45 times, berated the mainstream media 32 times and tweeted about conspiracy theories 12 times.Sometimes the president's apparent fury on Twitter is meant to troll his critics and get a rise out of them, many of his closest aides said. But they still brace themselves, knowing that they are likely to be blindsided by one of his tweets. Aides who gather for the early-morning staff meetings in the West Wing said their agenda was regularly blown up when their phones simultaneously went off with a tweet from the boss.Once Trump arrives in the West Wing -- usually after 10 a.m. -- Dan Scavino, White House social media director, takes control of the Twitter account, tweeting as @realDonaldTrump from his own phone or computer. Trump rarely tweets in front of others, those close to him said, because he does not like to wear the reading glasses he needs to see the screen.Instead, the president dictates tweets to Scavino, who sits in a closet-size room just off the Oval Office until Trump calls out "Scavino!" Often, he prints out suggested tweets in extra-large fonts for the president to sign off on. (A single-page article that Scavino recently printed out for him ran to six pages after the fonts were enlarged, according to one person who saw it.)Scavino's role in Trump's Twitter machine has made him an unlikely White House power broker and the go-to person for aides, business executives, friends and lawmakers who want the president to tweet something. Conway noted what she called the hypocrisy of many Republicans who begged her to get Trump to stop tweeting during the 2016 campaign and now come to Scavino with suggestions. Scavino declined to be interviewed for this article.He sometimes acts as a brake -- or tries to -- on the president's tweeting impulses. When Trump started angrily posting about the "Squad," Scavino told him it was a bad idea, according to an aide who witnessed the conversation. Along with Michael Dubke, who served as White House communications director for several months in 2017 and is from Buffalo, New York, home of the famous chicken wings, Scavino presented some tweets to Trump in degrees of outrageousness: "hot," "medium" or "mild." Trump, said one former official who saw the proposed messages, always picked the most incendiary ones and often wanted to make them even more provocative.And while many of Trump's tweets are shoot-from-the-hip attacks, he chews over others for days or even weeks, waiting for just the right moment to maximize the reaction, aides said.He plotted for days to tweet about Mika Brzezinski, liberal co-host of the popular MSNBC morning program, according to former White House officials, before finally posting one morning in June 2017. He called her "low I.Q. Crazy Mika" and wrote that she had been "bleeding badly from a face-lift" during a New Year's Eve party.In October of last year, the president started telling his aides that he planned to denounce Stormy Daniels, a pornographic-film actress who claimed to have had an affair with him more than a decade earlier. He said he wanted to call her a "horse face."Several current and former aides recalled telling Trump that it was a terrible idea and would renew accusations of misogyny against him. But he persisted.Finally, after watching a Fox News report days later about how a federal judge had thrown out a lawsuit by Daniels, the president tapped out the tweet."Great, now I can go after Horseface and her 3rd rate lawyer in the Great State of Texas," he wrote.A Love of 'Likes'For Trump, Twitter reinforces his instincts about his performance as president.After a rally in Dallas in mid-October, Trump's aides prepared a large-type printout of tweets gushing over his speech that day, including one from Tomi Lahren, a Fox News commentator and host of a show on the Fox Nation site. Trump scrawled a thank-you note on one copy to Lahren -- who then tweeted a picture of the letter back at the president.Aides said they often compiled positive feedback for Trump. He revels in the stream of praise from his most loyal followers on paper or as he scrolls through his phone early in the morning and late at night. He considers his following to be like the ratings on a TV show, better than any approval poll. After one weekend Twitter spree, the president told Sarah Huckabee Sanders, his press secretary at the time, he had expected a tweet he was particularly proud of to get more response than it did, according to a former administration official. Sanders said that if he tweeted 60 times, people wouldn't pay as much attention, the official said.The president is keenly aware of his number of followers and reluctant to acknowledge that any of them are not real. Trump has accused Twitter of political bias for its periodic purges of bot accounts across the platform, which have cost him -- and other prominent users -- hundreds of thousands of followers. When he met with the company's chief executive, Jack Dorsey, in April, Trump reportedly pressed him at length about the lost followers.There is plenty of evidence that Trump's Twitter following may not be a reliable proxy for what the American people think of the job he is doing.It is difficult, if not impossible, to determine with certainty how many of Trump's more than 66 million followers are fake. Some studies of his followers have estimated that a high proportion are likely to be automated bots, fake accounts or inactive. But even a conservative analysis by the Times found that nearly a third of them, about 22 million, included no biographical information and used the service's default profile image -- two signs the accounts may be rarely used or inactive. Fourteen percent have automatically generated user names, another indication that an account may not belong to a real person.Even if Trump is not shouting into the void on Twitter, he is often preaching to the converted. Data from Stirista, an analytics firm, shows that his followers tend to be the kind of users who are most likely to be his supporters -- disproportionately older, white and male compared with Twitter users overall.And they constitute just a fraction of the electorate. According to the Times analysis of Pew data, only about 4% of American adults, or about 11 million people, follow him on Twitter. Those followers represent less that one-fifth of his total, the analysis shows.According to data from YouGov, which polls about most of the president's tweets, some of the topics on which Trump got the most likes and retweets -- jabs at the NFL, posts about the special counsel's investigation, unfounded allegations of widespread voter fraud -- poll poorly with the general public.But people close to Trump said there was no dissuading him that the "likes" a tweet got were evidence that a decision or policy proposal was well received.Last December, after Trump announced plans to withdraw some troops from Syria, lawmakers came to the White House to argue against it. According to Politico, Trump responded by calling in Scavino."Tell them how popular my policy is," Trump asked Scavino, who described for the lawmakers social media postings that had praised Trump's decision. Aides said that for Trump, his Twitter "likes" were proof that he had made the right call.The reaction in the outside world was far less favorable. Within weeks, Trump's defense secretary and the special anti-ISIS envoy quit over the decision. U.S. allies were enraged. More than two-thirds of the Senate voted to rebuke Trump, who agreed under pressure to keep the troops in Syria.Almost a year later, U.S. troops in Syria became an issue again after Trump appeared to give President Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey a green light to invade Kurdish-controlled areas in northern Syria.That resulted in another congressional rebuke for Trump and complaints even from loyal Republican allies. In subsequent days, Trump sought to defend himself on Twitter, alternately denying he had abandoned the Kurds and suggesting the United States had no stake in their safety, threatening Erdogan if the incursion continued and praising Turkey as an important trading partner.Many people took note of the back-and-forth, including Erdogan. "When we take a look at Mr. Trump's Twitter posts, we can no longer follow them," the Turkish president told reporters mockingly in mid-October, according to Hurriyet, a Turkish newspaper. "We cannot keep track."A Tool for ReelectionIn the months ahead, the man tasked with winning Trump a second term is hoping to focus the president's Twitter habit on its original purpose: connecting with voters.Brad Parscale, who served as Trump's digital director in 2016 and is now campaign manager, has worked closely with Scavino to shape perceptions of the president through social media. The two men speak a half-dozen times a day, according to people familiar with their interactions.Parscale criticized Twitter after it announced Wednesday that it would no longer allow paid political advertising on the platform, calling it "yet another attempt to silence conservatives." But the change may benefit Trump: He has a far larger organic Twitter following than any of his likely Democratic opponents and is therefore less reliant on paid ads to spread his message through the platform.While some campaign aides said Trump's tweets can be a distraction, they also view Twitter as an essential tool to present him as someone strong, willing to stand up to so-called political elites and what the president recently called the "unholy alliance of corrupt Democrat politicians, deep-state bureaucrats and the fake-news media."The aides seek to cultivate the image of a man who understands "regular people." Trump's team believes that his unvarnished writing, poor punctuation and increasing profanity on Twitter signals authenticity -- a contrast to the polished, vetted, often anodyne social media style of most candidates.Twitter, Conway said, is the president's most potent weapon when it comes to bypassing the powerful people he believes have controlled the flow of information too long."It's the democratization of information," she said. Everyone receives Trump's tweets at once -- the stay-at-home mom, the plumber working on the sink, the billionaire executive, the White House correspondent."They all hear 'ping,'" she said, "at the same time."----MethodologyThe New York Times reviewed every tweet and retweet sent by President Donald Trump from Jan. 20, 2017, through Oct. 15, 2019. Each one was evaluated and tagged for several factors: whether it included an attack or praise; who or what was attacked or praised; and for topics including trade, immigration, the military, the economy, the 2018 midterm elections, the Russia investigation and the House impeachment inquiry. In the Times analysis, retweets in each of those categories were counted as tweets.The Times reviewed each Twitter account that followed Trump by analyzing profile information, tweet frequency and the date the account was created. The Times also used data from Pew Research to estimate how many American adults follow Trump on Twitter. Pew Research conducted a nationally representative sample of American adults with personal, public Twitter accounts to analyze how many follow American politicians.This article originally appeared in The New York Times.(C) 2019 The New York Times Company

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US Confirms Report Citing Iran Officials as Saying 1,500 Killed in Protests

The United States has confirmed a news report citing unnamed Iranian officials as saying about 1,500 people were killed in a crackdown by security forces on anti-government protests last month.

In a report published Monday, London-based Reuters said it obtained the death toll from three Iranian interior ministry officials who said the fatalities included "at least 17 teenagers and about 400 women as well as some members of the security forces and police."

Special Report: Iran's Leader Ordered Crackdown on Unrest - 'Do Whatever it Takes to End it'

Order, confirmed by three sources close to the supreme leader’s inner circle and a fourth official, set in motion the bloodiest crackdown on protesters since the Islamic Revolution in 1979

In a Monday tweet, the State Department quoted U.S. Special Representative for Iran Brian Hook as saying the Reuters report "underscores the urgency for the international community to punish the perpetrators and isolate the regime for the murder of 1,500 Iranian citizens."

Special Representative for Iran Brian Hook: “The @Reuters report on the massacre ordered by @khamenei_ir underscores the urgency for the international community to punish the perpetrators and isolate the regime for the murder of 1,500 Iranian citizens.” https://t.co/TpUncLjDcv

— Department of State (@StateDept) December 23, 2019

Reuters' death toll was much higher than the latest fatalities reported by British rights group Amnesty International, which said in a Dec. 16 statement that it documented the killings of at least 304 demonstrators by Iranian security forces in days of unrest that erupted on Nov. 15.

Hook's reference to the "murder of 1,500 Iranian citizens" also marked a substantial increase in the Trump administration's assessment of the number of people killed in Iran's crackdown.

In a Dec. 5 briefing to reporters, Hook said it appeared that the Iranian government  "could have murdered over a thousand Iranian citizens since the protests began."

US Official: Iran Protest Deaths May Have Topped 1,000

Deadly protests erupted last month after government boosted fuel prices by as much as 300%

Iranian State-approved news agency Tasnim quoted an official at the Supreme National Security Council (SNSC) as saying the Reuters report referencing the deaths of 1,500 people was "fake news."

"These claims are based on premeditated psychological warfare and lack credibility," Alireza Zarifian Yeganeh said, echoing previous Iranian dismissals of Western reports about fatalities in the protests.

But Iran has declined to try to prove the Western reports wrong by releasing its own figures for those killed, wounded and arrested in the crackdown on the protests. Iranian authorities sparked the demonstrations in dozens of cities nationwide by raising the subsidized price of gasoline by 50%, further straining the finances of Iranians facing high unemployment and inflation in a shrinking economy under heavy U.S. sanctions.

In a Dec. 16 interview with VOA Persian, Amnesty's Middle East researcher Philip Luther said he expected the group to raise its figure of 304 protesters killed due to its ongoing examination of "credible" reports showing Iranian security forces used live ammunition while suppressing the demonstrations.

Amnesty did not respond immediately to a VOA Persian request for comment on the Reuters report citing the figure of 1,500 people killed in the unrest.

Amnesty's reported death tolls from Iran's unrest have been widely quoted by Western news outlets, which, besides Reuters, have been unable to verify the full scale of the killings due to Iranian restrictions on their access to the country.

The rights group has said it compiles its death tolls from reports whose credibility it ascertains by interviewing and cross-checking details provided by a "range of sources inside and outside Iran, including victims' relatives, journalists and human rights activists involved in gathering the information."

This article originated in VOA's Persian Service.  

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How Trump Reshaped the Presidency in Over 11,000 Tweets

In the Oval Office, an annoyed President Donald Trump ended an argument he was having with his aides. He reached into a drawer, took out his iPhone and threw it on top of the historic Resolute Desk:"Do you want me to settle this right now?"There was no missing Trump's threat that day in early 2017, the aides recalled. With a tweet, he could fling a directive to the world, and there was nothing they could do about it.When Trump entered office, Twitter was a political tool that had helped get him elected and a digital howitzer that he relished firing. In the years since, he has fully integrated Twitter into the very fabric of his administration, reshaping the nature of the presidency and presidential power.After Turkey invaded northern Syria this past month, he crafted his response not only in White House meetings but also in a series of contradictory tweets. This summer, he announced increased tariffs on $300 billion worth of Chinese goods, using a tweet to deepen tensions between the two countries. And in March, Trump cast aside more than 50 years of U.S. policy, tweeting his recognition of Israel's sovereignty in the Golan Heights. He openly delighted in the reaction he provoked."Boom. I press it," Trump recalled months later at a White House conference attended by conservative social media personalities, "and, within two seconds, 'We have breaking news.'"Early on, top aides wanted to restrain the president's Twitter habit, even considering asking the company to impose a 15-minute delay on Trump's messages. But 11,390 presidential tweets later, many administration officials and lawmakers embrace his Twitter obsession, flocking to his social media chief with suggestions. Policy meetings are hijacked when Trump gets an idea for a tweet, drawing in cabinet members and others for wordsmithing. And as a president often at war with his own bureaucracy, he deploys Twitter to break through logjams, overrule or humiliate recalcitrant advisers and preempt his staff."He needs to tweet like we need to eat," Kellyanne Conway, his White House counselor, said in an interview.In a presidency unlike any other, where Trump wakes to Twitter, goes to bed with it and is comforted by how much it revolves around him, the person he most often singled out for praise was himself -- more than 2,000 times, according to an analysis by The New York Times.The Times examined Trump's use of Twitter since taking office, reviewing all his tweets, retweets and followers and interviewing nearly 50 current and former administration officials, lawmakers and Twitter executives and employees. What has emerged is a rich account, with new analysis, previously unreported episodes and fresh details of how the president exploits the platform to exert power.It is often by brute repetition. He has taken to Twitter to demand action 1,159 times on immigration and his border wall, a top priority, and 521 times on tariffs, another key agenda item. Twitter is an instrument of his foreign policy: He has praised dictators more than a hundred times, while complaining nearly twice as much about the U.S.' traditional allies. Twitter is the Trump administration's de facto personnel office: The chief executive has announced the departures of more than two dozen top officials, some fired by tweet.More than half of the president's posts -- 5,889 -- have been attacks; no other category even comes close. His targets include the Russia investigation, a Federal Reserve that won't bow to his whims, previous administrations, entire cities that are led by Democrats, and adversaries from outspoken athletes to chief executives who displease him. Like no other modern president, Trump has publicly harangued businesses to advance his political goals and silence criticism, often with talk of government intervention. Using Twitter, he threatened "Saturday Night Live" with an investigation by the Federal Communications Commission and accused Amazon, led by Jeff Bezos, owner of The Washington Post, of cheating the U.S. Postal Service.As much as anything, Twitter is the broadcast network for Trump's parallel political reality -- the "alternative facts" he has used to spread conspiracy theories, fake information and extremist content, including material that energizes some of his base.Trump's use of Twitter has accelerated sharply since the end of the special counsel's Russia investigation and reached a new high as Democrats opened an impeachment inquiry, the analysis shows. He tweeted more than 500 times during the first two weeks of October, a pace that put him on track to triple his monthly average. (The Times analyzed Trump's tweets through Oct. 15. The total by the end of the month reached 11,887.)His more than 66 million Twitter followers have become his private polling service, offering what he sees as validation for his performance in office. But fewer than one-fifth of his followers are voting-age Americans, according to a Times analysis of Pew Research national surveys of adults who use Twitter.The White House press office declined to comment for this article and turned down an interview request with the president. Now, as Trump anticipates a bitter reelection battle and faces an impeachment inquiry by Democrats, the stakes are higher than ever before, and Twitter even more central to his presidency.His top campaign aides are embracing the outrage that Trump stirs with his tweets to reinforce his anti-establishment brand and strengthen his bond with the fiercely loyal supporters who propelled him into office. And as public backing for impeachment grows, the president is using the platform to build a defensive echo chamber.While people around Trump acknowledge that his tweets can cause political damage, the president is confident in his mastery of Twitter.This past week, as he announced that U.S. Special Forces had killed Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, leader of the Islamic State, Trump noted the terror group's digital prowess. "They use the internet better than almost anybody in the world," he said. "Perhaps other than Donald Trump."Policy Via TwitterWith a single tweet last fall, Trump sent his administration into a tailspin. "I must, in the strongest of terms, ask Mexico to stop this onslaught," he wrote in October 2018, angry about a caravan of migrants from Central America. "If unable to do so I will call up the U.S. Military and CLOSE OUR SOUTHERN BORDER!"Trump's aides had tried for weeks to talk him out of shutting down the border; the logistics would be impossible and the economic pain extreme. The tweet prompted an emergency meeting down the hall from the Oval Office as aides scrambled to head off Trump's impulse, according to people familiar with the frantic scene. Like others in this article, they spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of angering the president.The aides succeeded in temporarily holding him off, but the tweet crystallized for cautious bureaucrats exactly what he wanted: to stop people from coming into the country. In the months that followed, Trump's threat helped to set off an effort inside the government to find ever more restrictive ways to block immigrants. Nearly six months later, Kirstjen Nielsen, homeland security secretary, was still trying to prevent a border shutdown when the president brought her resistance to an end."Kirstjen Nielsen," he tweeted, "will be leaving her position."This is governing in the Trump era. For President Barack Obama, a tweet about a presidential proposal might mark the conclusion of a long, deliberative process. For Trump, Twitter is often the beginning of how policy is made."Suddenly there's a tweet, and everything gets upended, and you spent the week trying to defend something else," said Rep. Peter King, R-N.Y. "This person thrives on chaos. What we may find disconcerting or upsetting or whatever, it is actually what keeps him going."In October 2017, Rex Tillerson, the president's first secretary of state, was in China with a team of diplomats negotiating sanctions on Kim Jong Un, the North Korean leader, when Trump weighed in on Twitter. Tillerson was "wasting his time trying to negotiate with Little Rocket Man," he wrote. "Save your energy Rex, we'll do what has to be done!"Two months later, a Reuters headline blared that Mick Mulvaney, who then was Trump's new pick to lead the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, had decided to put "on ice" sanctions against Wells Fargo for consumer abuses. It was little surprise: Mulvaney was an ally of the financial industry. But Trump had other ideas."Fines and penalties against Wells Fargo Bank for their bad acts against their customers and others will not be dropped, as has incorrectly been reported, but will be pursued and, if anything, substantially increased," he tweeted.Political appointees at the bureau wanted to affirm Trump's desire publicly, despite long-standing policies against commenting on active investigations, according to former officials there. A spokesman for Mulvaney issued a statement saying only that he "shares the president's firm commitment to punishing bad actors and protecting American consumers."According to two people with direct knowledge of the Wells Fargo inquiry, career bureau officials took Trump's outburst as a green light to pursue aggressive negotiations with the bank, even as Mulvaney's team prepared to dial back penalties in other cases or shelve them. Wells Fargo ultimately agreed to a billion-dollar federal settlement, the bureau's largest-ever civil penalty.Over time, Trump has turned Twitter into a means of presidential communication as vital as a statement from the White House press secretary or an Oval Office address. The press secretary has not held a daily on-camera press briefing -- a decadeslong ritual of presidential messaging -- since March. Instead, Trump's Twitter activity drives the day.And Trump has removed any doubt that his tweets carry the weight once reserved for more formal pronouncements.In summer 2018, his aides repeatedly tried to reassure Republican lawmakers that the president backed their hard-line immigration bill, despite his remarks suggesting otherwise. But privately, Trump told several senators that there was only one certain sign of his support."If I don't tweet it," he said, according to two former senior advisers, "don't listen to my staff."Adapting a PlatformWhen Trump entered office, aides were determined to rein in his itchy Twitter fingers.In a series of informal conversations in early 2017, top White House officials discussed the possibility of a 15-minute delay on the president's account, a technical change not unlike the five-second naughty-word system used by television networks. But, one former senior official said, they quickly abandoned the idea after recognizing the political peril if it leaked to the press -- or to their boss.Several weeks later, a trio of close advisers presented Trump with another idea. Gary Cohn, the top economic adviser; Hope Hicks, the president's director of strategic communications; and Rob Porter, his staff secretary, argued that they should see the tweets before he sent them out.Trump was skeptical, worrying that delayed tweets would be irrelevant, according to a former White House official. But he agreed to a weeklong trial. Within 72 hours, the president had resumed tweeting from his golf club in Bedminster, New Jersey.Three thousand miles away, in Silicon Valley, similar conversations were unfolding at Twitter's offices, where executives faced the same dilemma as Trump's inner circle: whether, and how, to restrain him.At the time, Twitter lagged far behind larger competitors like Facebook. While popular among politicians and journalists, it was struggling financially. But the president's incessant tweeting gave the company more currency.His Twitter account often drove more "impressions" -- a key company metric -- than any other in the world. But some of his messages seemed to violate the company's policies against abuse and incitement.On a now-defunct internal company message board known as Twitter Buzz, some left-leaning employees favored barring the president. Trump's behavior came up at almost every all-hands gathering and at many smaller meetings of executives. Some of them had set their phones to alert them whenever the president tweeted, according to a former employee who spoke on the condition of confidentiality."What I saw was a company coming to grips with an entirely new situation, a new level of scrutiny, a new level of vitriol," said Dianna Colasurdo, a former account executive on Twitter's political advertising sales team, "and working to adapt their policies in the moment to align with that."A turning point came in fall 2017, at the height of tensions with North Korea, when Trump tweeted that the rogue nation might not "be around much longer!" The country's foreign minister called that a declaration of war. On Twitter, users wondered if the company would allow Trump to tweet his way into a nuclear conflict.The response came the next day. Referring back to Trump's online declaration, Twitter announced in a tweet that it took "newsworthiness" into account when evaluating whether to remove a post that violated its policies.In an interview, Twitter executives said that newsworthiness had long figured into the company's internal enforcement guidelines and that officials there had been formulating the announcement, which applied worldwide, months before Trump's North Korea tweet. But former employees said they understood the announcement to be Trump-driven. Twitter did not want to be in the business of censoring the president.Late in summer 2018, White House insiders tried again to curb Trump's use of social media, according to two former aides. After a series of over-the-top weeks of tweeting -- including calling Omarosa Manigault Newman, his onetime aide, "wacky" and "a lowlife" -- several advisers suggested he go just two days without Twitter and see what happened. Trump nodded and then promptly discarded the advice.King, who said most of his Republican colleagues wished the president would tweet less, added that whenever he had raised the issue with White House staff members, they shrugged helplessly."It's not going to stop," he recalled their saying. "Forget it; we've all tried."Soon enough, Trump was as prolific as ever.On Sept. 13, he mocked Jamie Dimon, chief executive of JPMorgan Chase, for claiming he could beat Trump in an election. "He doesn't have the aptitude or 'smarts' & is a poor public speaker & nervous mess," the president tweeted. Over the next 12 hours, Trump attacked two former FBI officials, accused The Wall Street Journal of getting a tariff story wrong and blasted former Secretary of State John Kerry for holding "illegal meetings" with Iran."BAD!" he wrote.First Things FirstTrump's Twitter habit is most intense in the morning, when he is in the White House residence, watching Fox News, scrolling through his Twitter mentions and turning the social media platform into what one aide called the "ultimate weapon of mass dissemination."Of the attack tweets identified in the Times analysis, nearly half were sent between 6 a.m. and 10 a.m., hours that Trump spends mostly without advisers present.After waking early, Trump typically watches news shows recorded the previous night on his "Super TiVo," several DVRs connected to a single remote. (The devices are set to record "Lou Dobbs Tonight" on Fox Business Network; "Hannity," "Tucker Carlson Tonight" and "The Story With Martha MacCallum" on Fox News; and "Anderson Cooper 360" on CNN.)He takes in those shows and the "Fox & Friends" morning program, then flings out comments on his iPhone. Then he watches as his tweets reverberate on cable channels and news sites.Early on Sept. 2 -- the start of a week in which he tweeted 198 times -- the president sent a few benign tweets, then lashed out at Paul Krugman as a "Failing New York Times columnist" who "never got it!" Over the next 44 minutes, he fired off 10 more tweets. He disparaged Richard Trumka, president of the AFL-CIO ("Likes what we are doing until the cameras go on.") He called James Comey, the former FBI director, and his "dwindling group of friends" liars and traitors. He railed against The Washington Post and four women of color in Congress who called themselves "the Squad."Almost every morning that week, Trump kicked off the day with an attack on one critic or another: the "incompetent Mayor of London," or "Bad 'actress' Debra The Mess Messing" -- whom he accused of being racist -- or the "Fake News Media." He referred to conservative media outlets 45 times, berated the mainstream media 32 times and tweeted about conspiracy theories 12 times.Sometimes the president's apparent fury on Twitter is meant to troll his critics and get a rise out of them, many of his closest aides said. But they still brace themselves, knowing that they are likely to be blindsided by one of his tweets. Aides who gather for the early-morning staff meetings in the West Wing said their agenda was regularly blown up when their phones simultaneously went off with a tweet from the boss.Once Trump arrives in the West Wing -- usually after 10 a.m. -- Dan Scavino, White House social media director, takes control of the Twitter account, tweeting as @realDonaldTrump from his own phone or computer. Trump rarely tweets in front of others, those close to him said, because he does not like to wear the reading glasses he needs to see the screen.Instead, the president dictates tweets to Scavino, who sits in a closet-size room just off the Oval Office until Trump calls out "Scavino!" Often, he prints out suggested tweets in extra-large fonts for the president to sign off on. (A single-page article that Scavino recently printed out for him ran to six pages after the fonts were enlarged, according to one person who saw it.)Scavino's role in Trump's Twitter machine has made him an unlikely White House power broker and the go-to person for aides, business executives, friends and lawmakers who want the president to tweet something. Conway noted what she called the hypocrisy of many Republicans who begged her to get Trump to stop tweeting during the 2016 campaign and now come to Scavino with suggestions. Scavino declined to be interviewed for this article.He sometimes acts as a brake -- or tries to -- on the president's tweeting impulses. When Trump started angrily posting about the "Squad," Scavino told him it was a bad idea, according to an aide who witnessed the conversation. Along with Michael Dubke, who served as White House communications director for several months in 2017 and is from Buffalo, New York, home of the famous chicken wings, Scavino presented some tweets to Trump in degrees of outrageousness: "hot," "medium" or "mild." Trump, said one former official who saw the proposed messages, always picked the most incendiary ones and often wanted to make them even more provocative.And while many of Trump's tweets are shoot-from-the-hip attacks, he chews over others for days or even weeks, waiting for just the right moment to maximize the reaction, aides said.He plotted for days to tweet about Mika Brzezinski, liberal co-host of the popular MSNBC morning program, according to former White House officials, before finally posting one morning in June 2017. He called her "low I.Q. Crazy Mika" and wrote that she had been "bleeding badly from a face-lift" during a New Year's Eve party.In October of last year, the president started telling his aides that he planned to denounce Stormy Daniels, a pornographic-film actress who claimed to have had an affair with him more than a decade earlier. He said he wanted to call her a "horse face."Several current and former aides recalled telling Trump that it was a terrible idea and would renew accusations of misogyny against him. But he persisted.Finally, after watching a Fox News report days later about how a federal judge had thrown out a lawsuit by Daniels, the president tapped out the tweet."Great, now I can go after Horseface and her 3rd rate lawyer in the Great State of Texas," he wrote.A Love of 'Likes'For Trump, Twitter reinforces his instincts about his performance as president.After a rally in Dallas in mid-October, Trump's aides prepared a large-type printout of tweets gushing over his speech that day, including one from Tomi Lahren, a Fox News commentator and host of a show on the Fox Nation site. Trump scrawled a thank-you note on one copy to Lahren -- who then tweeted a picture of the letter back at the president.Aides said they often compiled positive feedback for Trump. He revels in the stream of praise from his most loyal followers on paper or as he scrolls through his phone early in the morning and late at night. He considers his following to be like the ratings on a TV show, better than any approval poll. After one weekend Twitter spree, the president told Sarah Huckabee Sanders, his press secretary at the time, he had expected a tweet he was particularly proud of to get more response than it did, according to a former administration official. Sanders said that if he tweeted 60 times, people wouldn't pay as much attention, the official said.The president is keenly aware of his number of followers and reluctant to acknowledge that any of them are not real. Trump has accused Twitter of political bias for its periodic purges of bot accounts across the platform, which have cost him -- and other prominent users -- hundreds of thousands of followers. When he met with the company's chief executive, Jack Dorsey, in April, Trump reportedly pressed him at length about the lost followers.There is plenty of evidence that Trump's Twitter following may not be a reliable proxy for what the American people think of the job he is doing.It is difficult, if not impossible, to determine with certainty how many of Trump's more than 66 million followers are fake. Some studies of his followers have estimated that a high proportion are likely to be automated bots, fake accounts or inactive. But even a conservative analysis by the Times found that nearly a third of them, about 22 million, included no biographical information and used the service's default profile image -- two signs the accounts may be rarely used or inactive. Fourteen percent have automatically generated user names, another indication that an account may not belong to a real person.Even if Trump is not shouting into the void on Twitter, he is often preaching to the converted. Data from Stirista, an analytics firm, shows that his followers tend to be the kind of users who are most likely to be his supporters -- disproportionately older, white and male compared with Twitter users overall.And they constitute just a fraction of the electorate. According to the Times analysis of Pew data, only about 4% of American adults, or about 11 million people, follow him on Twitter. Those followers represent less that one-fifth of his total, the analysis shows.According to data from YouGov, which polls about most of the president's tweets, some of the topics on which Trump got the most likes and retweets -- jabs at the NFL, posts about the special counsel's investigation, unfounded allegations of widespread voter fraud -- poll poorly with the general public.But people close to Trump said there was no dissuading him that the "likes" a tweet got were evidence that a decision or policy proposal was well received.Last December, after Trump announced plans to withdraw some troops from Syria, lawmakers came to the White House to argue against it. According to Politico, Trump responded by calling in Scavino."Tell them how popular my policy is," Trump asked Scavino, who described for the lawmakers social media postings that had praised Trump's decision. Aides said that for Trump, his Twitter "likes" were proof that he had made the right call.The reaction in the outside world was far less favorable. Within weeks, Trump's defense secretary and the special anti-ISIS envoy quit over the decision. U.S. allies were enraged. More than two-thirds of the Senate voted to rebuke Trump, who agreed under pressure to keep the troops in Syria.Almost a year later, U.S. troops in Syria became an issue again after Trump appeared to give President Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey a green light to invade Kurdish-controlled areas in northern Syria.That resulted in another congressional rebuke for Trump and complaints even from loyal Republican allies. In subsequent days, Trump sought to defend himself on Twitter, alternately denying he had abandoned the Kurds and suggesting the United States had no stake in their safety, threatening Erdogan if the incursion continued and praising Turkey as an important trading partner.Many people took note of the back-and-forth, including Erdogan. "When we take a look at Mr. Trump's Twitter posts, we can no longer follow them," the Turkish president told reporters mockingly in mid-October, according to Hurriyet, a Turkish newspaper. "We cannot keep track."A Tool for ReelectionIn the months ahead, the man tasked with winning Trump a second term is hoping to focus the president's Twitter habit on its original purpose: connecting with voters.Brad Parscale, who served as Trump's digital director in 2016 and is now campaign manager, has worked closely with Scavino to shape perceptions of the president through social media. The two men speak a half-dozen times a day, according to people familiar with their interactions.Parscale criticized Twitter after it announced Wednesday that it would no longer allow paid political advertising on the platform, calling it "yet another attempt to silence conservatives." But the change may benefit Trump: He has a far larger organic Twitter following than any of his likely Democratic opponents and is therefore less reliant on paid ads to spread his message through the platform.While some campaign aides said Trump's tweets can be a distraction, they also view Twitter as an essential tool to present him as someone strong, willing to stand up to so-called political elites and what the president recently called the "unholy alliance of corrupt Democrat politicians, deep-state bureaucrats and the fake-news media."The aides seek to cultivate the image of a man who understands "regular people." Trump's team believes that his unvarnished writing, poor punctuation and increasing profanity on Twitter signals authenticity -- a contrast to the polished, vetted, often anodyne social media style of most candidates.Twitter, Conway said, is the president's most potent weapon when it comes to bypassing the powerful people he believes have controlled the flow of information too long."It's the democratization of information," she said. Everyone receives Trump's tweets at once -- the stay-at-home mom, the plumber working on the sink, the billionaire executive, the White House correspondent."They all hear 'ping,'" she said, "at the same time."----MethodologyThe New York Times reviewed every tweet and retweet sent by President Donald Trump from Jan. 20, 2017, through Oct. 15, 2019. Each one was evaluated and tagged for several factors: whether it included an attack or praise; who or what was attacked or praised; and for topics including trade, immigration, the military, the economy, the 2018 midterm elections, the Russia investigation and the House impeachment inquiry. In the Times analysis, retweets in each of those categories were counted as tweets.The Times reviewed each Twitter account that followed Trump by analyzing profile information, tweet frequency and the date the account was created. The Times also used data from Pew Research to estimate how many American adults follow Trump on Twitter. Pew Research conducted a nationally representative sample of American adults with personal, public Twitter accounts to analyze how many follow American politicians.This article originally appeared in The New York Times.(C) 2019 The New York Times Company

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In the Oval Office, an annoyed President Donald Trump ended an argument he was having with his aides. He reached into a drawer, took out his iPhone and threw it on top of the historic Resolute Desk:"Do you want me to settle this right now?"There was no missing Trump's threat that day in early 2017, the aides recalled. With a tweet, he could fling a directive to the world, and there was nothing they could do about it.When Trump entered office, Twitter was a political tool that had helped get him elected and a digital howitzer that he relished firing. In the years since, he has fully integrated Twitter into the very fabric of his administration, reshaping the nature of the presidency and presidential power.After Turkey invaded northern Syria this past month, he crafted his response not only in White House meetings but also in a series of contradictory tweets. This summer, he announced increased tariffs on $300 billion worth of Chinese goods, using a tweet to deepen tensions between the two countries. And in March, Trump cast aside more than 50 years of U.S. policy, tweeting his recognition of Israel's sovereignty in the Golan Heights. He openly delighted in the reaction he provoked."Boom. I press it," Trump recalled months later at a White House conference attended by conservative social media personalities, "and, within two seconds, 'We have breaking news.'"Early on, top aides wanted to restrain the president's Twitter habit, even considering asking the company to impose a 15-minute delay on Trump's messages. But 11,390 presidential tweets later, many administration officials and lawmakers embrace his Twitter obsession, flocking to his social media chief with suggestions. Policy meetings are hijacked when Trump gets an idea for a tweet, drawing in cabinet members and others for wordsmithing. And as a president often at war with his own bureaucracy, he deploys Twitter to break through logjams, overrule or humiliate recalcitrant advisers and preempt his staff."He needs to tweet like we need to eat," Kellyanne Conway, his White House counselor, said in an interview.In a presidency unlike any other, where Trump wakes to Twitter, goes to bed with it and is comforted by how much it revolves around him, the person he most often singled out for praise was himself -- more than 2,000 times, according to an analysis by The New York Times.The Times examined Trump's use of Twitter since taking office, reviewing all his tweets, retweets and followers and interviewing nearly 50 current and former administration officials, lawmakers and Twitter executives and employees. What has emerged is a rich account, with new analysis, previously unreported episodes and fresh details of how the president exploits the platform to exert power.It is often by brute repetition. He has taken to Twitter to demand action 1,159 times on immigration and his border wall, a top priority, and 521 times on tariffs, another key agenda item. Twitter is an instrument of his foreign policy: He has praised dictators more than a hundred times, while complaining nearly twice as much about the U.S.' traditional allies. Twitter is the Trump administration's de facto personnel office: The chief executive has announced the departures of more than two dozen top officials, some fired by tweet.More than half of the president's posts -- 5,889 -- have been attacks; no other category even comes close. His targets include the Russia investigation, a Federal Reserve that won't bow to his whims, previous administrations, entire cities that are led by Democrats, and adversaries from outspoken athletes to chief executives who displease him. Like no other modern president, Trump has publicly harangued businesses to advance his political goals and silence criticism, often with talk of government intervention. Using Twitter, he threatened "Saturday Night Live" with an investigation by the Federal Communications Commission and accused Amazon, led by Jeff Bezos, owner of The Washington Post, of cheating the U.S. Postal Service.As much as anything, Twitter is the broadcast network for Trump's parallel political reality -- the "alternative facts" he has used to spread conspiracy theories, fake information and extremist content, including material that energizes some of his base.Trump's use of Twitter has accelerated sharply since the end of the special counsel's Russia investigation and reached a new high as Democrats opened an impeachment inquiry, the analysis shows. He tweeted more than 500 times during the first two weeks of October, a pace that put him on track to triple his monthly average. (The Times analyzed Trump's tweets through Oct. 15. The total by the end of the month reached 11,887.)His more than 66 million Twitter followers have become his private polling service, offering what he sees as validation for his performance in office. But fewer than one-fifth of his followers are voting-age Americans, according to a Times analysis of Pew Research national surveys of adults who use Twitter.The White House press office declined to comment for this article and turned down an interview request with the president. Now, as Trump anticipates a bitter reelection battle and faces an impeachment inquiry by Democrats, the stakes are higher than ever before, and Twitter even more central to his presidency.His top campaign aides are embracing the outrage that Trump stirs with his tweets to reinforce his anti-establishment brand and strengthen his bond with the fiercely loyal supporters who propelled him into office. And as public backing for impeachment grows, the president is using the platform to build a defensive echo chamber.While people around Trump acknowledge that his tweets can cause political damage, the president is confident in his mastery of Twitter.This past week, as he announced that U.S. Special Forces had killed Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, leader of the Islamic State, Trump noted the terror group's digital prowess. "They use the internet better than almost anybody in the world," he said. "Perhaps other than Donald Trump."Policy Via TwitterWith a single tweet last fall, Trump sent his administration into a tailspin. "I must, in the strongest of terms, ask Mexico to stop this onslaught," he wrote in October 2018, angry about a caravan of migrants from Central America. "If unable to do so I will call up the U.S. Military and CLOSE OUR SOUTHERN BORDER!"Trump's aides had tried for weeks to talk him out of shutting down the border; the logistics would be impossible and the economic pain extreme. The tweet prompted an emergency meeting down the hall from the Oval Office as aides scrambled to head off Trump's impulse, according to people familiar with the frantic scene. Like others in this article, they spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of angering the president.The aides succeeded in temporarily holding him off, but the tweet crystallized for cautious bureaucrats exactly what he wanted: to stop people from coming into the country. In the months that followed, Trump's threat helped to set off an effort inside the government to find ever more restrictive ways to block immigrants. Nearly six months later, Kirstjen Nielsen, homeland security secretary, was still trying to prevent a border shutdown when the president brought her resistance to an end."Kirstjen Nielsen," he tweeted, "will be leaving her position."This is governing in the Trump era. For President Barack Obama, a tweet about a presidential proposal might mark the conclusion of a long, deliberative process. For Trump, Twitter is often the beginning of how policy is made."Suddenly there's a tweet, and everything gets upended, and you spent the week trying to defend something else," said Rep. Peter King, R-N.Y. "This person thrives on chaos. What we may find disconcerting or upsetting or whatever, it is actually what keeps him going."In October 2017, Rex Tillerson, the president's first secretary of state, was in China with a team of diplomats negotiating sanctions on Kim Jong Un, the North Korean leader, when Trump weighed in on Twitter. Tillerson was "wasting his time trying to negotiate with Little Rocket Man," he wrote. "Save your energy Rex, we'll do what has to be done!"Two months later, a Reuters headline blared that Mick Mulvaney, who then was Trump's new pick to lead the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, had decided to put "on ice" sanctions against Wells Fargo for consumer abuses. It was little surprise: Mulvaney was an ally of the financial industry. But Trump had other ideas."Fines and penalties against Wells Fargo Bank for their bad acts against their customers and others will not be dropped, as has incorrectly been reported, but will be pursued and, if anything, substantially increased," he tweeted.Political appointees at the bureau wanted to affirm Trump's desire publicly, despite long-standing policies against commenting on active investigations, according to former officials there. A spokesman for Mulvaney issued a statement saying only that he "shares the president's firm commitment to punishing bad actors and protecting American consumers."According to two people with direct knowledge of the Wells Fargo inquiry, career bureau officials took Trump's outburst as a green light to pursue aggressive negotiations with the bank, even as Mulvaney's team prepared to dial back penalties in other cases or shelve them. Wells Fargo ultimately agreed to a billion-dollar federal settlement, the bureau's largest-ever civil penalty.Over time, Trump has turned Twitter into a means of presidential communication as vital as a statement from the White House press secretary or an Oval Office address. The press secretary has not held a daily on-camera press briefing -- a decadeslong ritual of presidential messaging -- since March. Instead, Trump's Twitter activity drives the day.And Trump has removed any doubt that his tweets carry the weight once reserved for more formal pronouncements.In summer 2018, his aides repeatedly tried to reassure Republican lawmakers that the president backed their hard-line immigration bill, despite his remarks suggesting otherwise. But privately, Trump told several senators that there was only one certain sign of his support."If I don't tweet it," he said, according to two former senior advisers, "don't listen to my staff."Adapting a PlatformWhen Trump entered office, aides were determined to rein in his itchy Twitter fingers.In a series of informal conversations in early 2017, top White House officials discussed the possibility of a 15-minute delay on the president's account, a technical change not unlike the five-second naughty-word system used by television networks. But, one former senior official said, they quickly abandoned the idea after recognizing the political peril if it leaked to the press -- or to their boss.Several weeks later, a trio of close advisers presented Trump with another idea. Gary Cohn, the top economic adviser; Hope Hicks, the president's director of strategic communications; and Rob Porter, his staff secretary, argued that they should see the tweets before he sent them out.Trump was skeptical, worrying that delayed tweets would be irrelevant, according to a former White House official. But he agreed to a weeklong trial. Within 72 hours, the president had resumed tweeting from his golf club in Bedminster, New Jersey.Three thousand miles away, in Silicon Valley, similar conversations were unfolding at Twitter's offices, where executives faced the same dilemma as Trump's inner circle: whether, and how, to restrain him.At the time, Twitter lagged far behind larger competitors like Facebook. While popular among politicians and journalists, it was struggling financially. But the president's incessant tweeting gave the company more currency.His Twitter account often drove more "impressions" -- a key company metric -- than any other in the world. But some of his messages seemed to violate the company's policies against abuse and incitement.On a now-defunct internal company message board known as Twitter Buzz, some left-leaning employees favored barring the president. Trump's behavior came up at almost every all-hands gathering and at many smaller meetings of executives. Some of them had set their phones to alert them whenever the president tweeted, according to a former employee who spoke on the condition of confidentiality."What I saw was a company coming to grips with an entirely new situation, a new level of scrutiny, a new level of vitriol," said Dianna Colasurdo, a former account executive on Twitter's political advertising sales team, "and working to adapt their policies in the moment to align with that."A turning point came in fall 2017, at the height of tensions with North Korea, when Trump tweeted that the rogue nation might not "be around much longer!" The country's foreign minister called that a declaration of war. On Twitter, users wondered if the company would allow Trump to tweet his way into a nuclear conflict.The response came the next day. Referring back to Trump's online declaration, Twitter announced in a tweet that it took "newsworthiness" into account when evaluating whether to remove a post that violated its policies.In an interview, Twitter executives said that newsworthiness had long figured into the company's internal enforcement guidelines and that officials there had been formulating the announcement, which applied worldwide, months before Trump's North Korea tweet. But former employees said they understood the announcement to be Trump-driven. Twitter did not want to be in the business of censoring the president.Late in summer 2018, White House insiders tried again to curb Trump's use of social media, according to two former aides. After a series of over-the-top weeks of tweeting -- including calling Omarosa Manigault Newman, his onetime aide, "wacky" and "a lowlife" -- several advisers suggested he go just two days without Twitter and see what happened. Trump nodded and then promptly discarded the advice.King, who said most of his Republican colleagues wished the president would tweet less, added that whenever he had raised the issue with White House staff members, they shrugged helplessly."It's not going to stop," he recalled their saying. "Forget it; we've all tried."Soon enough, Trump was as prolific as ever.On Sept. 13, he mocked Jamie Dimon, chief executive of JPMorgan Chase, for claiming he could beat Trump in an election. "He doesn't have the aptitude or 'smarts' & is a poor public speaker & nervous mess," the president tweeted. Over the next 12 hours, Trump attacked two former FBI officials, accused The Wall Street Journal of getting a tariff story wrong and blasted former Secretary of State John Kerry for holding "illegal meetings" with Iran."BAD!" he wrote.First Things FirstTrump's Twitter habit is most intense in the morning, when he is in the White House residence, watching Fox News, scrolling through his Twitter mentions and turning the social media platform into what one aide called the "ultimate weapon of mass dissemination."Of the attack tweets identified in the Times analysis, nearly half were sent between 6 a.m. and 10 a.m., hours that Trump spends mostly without advisers present.After waking early, Trump typically watches news shows recorded the previous night on his "Super TiVo," several DVRs connected to a single remote. (The devices are set to record "Lou Dobbs Tonight" on Fox Business Network; "Hannity," "Tucker Carlson Tonight" and "The Story With Martha MacCallum" on Fox News; and "Anderson Cooper 360" on CNN.)He takes in those shows and the "Fox & Friends" morning program, then flings out comments on his iPhone. Then he watches as his tweets reverberate on cable channels and news sites.Early on Sept. 2 -- the start of a week in which he tweeted 198 times -- the president sent a few benign tweets, then lashed out at Paul Krugman as a "Failing New York Times columnist" who "never got it!" Over the next 44 minutes, he fired off 10 more tweets. He disparaged Richard Trumka, president of the AFL-CIO ("Likes what we are doing until the cameras go on.") He called James Comey, the former FBI director, and his "dwindling group of friends" liars and traitors. He railed against The Washington Post and four women of color in Congress who called themselves "the Squad."Almost every morning that week, Trump kicked off the day with an attack on one critic or another: the "incompetent Mayor of London," or "Bad 'actress' Debra The Mess Messing" -- whom he accused of being racist -- or the "Fake News Media." He referred to conservative media outlets 45 times, berated the mainstream media 32 times and tweeted about conspiracy theories 12 times.Sometimes the president's apparent fury on Twitter is meant to troll his critics and get a rise out of them, many of his closest aides said. But they still brace themselves, knowing that they are likely to be blindsided by one of his tweets. Aides who gather for the early-morning staff meetings in the West Wing said their agenda was regularly blown up when their phones simultaneously went off with a tweet from the boss.Once Trump arrives in the West Wing -- usually after 10 a.m. -- Dan Scavino, White House social media director, takes control of the Twitter account, tweeting as @realDonaldTrump from his own phone or computer. Trump rarely tweets in front of others, those close to him said, because he does not like to wear the reading glasses he needs to see the screen.Instead, the president dictates tweets to Scavino, who sits in a closet-size room just off the Oval Office until Trump calls out "Scavino!" Often, he prints out suggested tweets in extra-large fonts for the president to sign off on. (A single-page article that Scavino recently printed out for him ran to six pages after the fonts were enlarged, according to one person who saw it.)Scavino's role in Trump's Twitter machine has made him an unlikely White House power broker and the go-to person for aides, business executives, friends and lawmakers who want the president to tweet something. Conway noted what she called the hypocrisy of many Republicans who begged her to get Trump to stop tweeting during the 2016 campaign and now come to Scavino with suggestions. Scavino declined to be interviewed for this article.He sometimes acts as a brake -- or tries to -- on the president's tweeting impulses. When Trump started angrily posting about the "Squad," Scavino told him it was a bad idea, according to an aide who witnessed the conversation. Along with Michael Dubke, who served as White House communications director for several months in 2017 and is from Buffalo, New York, home of the famous chicken wings, Scavino presented some tweets to Trump in degrees of outrageousness: "hot," "medium" or "mild." Trump, said one former official who saw the proposed messages, always picked the most incendiary ones and often wanted to make them even more provocative.And while many of Trump's tweets are shoot-from-the-hip attacks, he chews over others for days or even weeks, waiting for just the right moment to maximize the reaction, aides said.He plotted for days to tweet about Mika Brzezinski, liberal co-host of the popular MSNBC morning program, according to former White House officials, before finally posting one morning in June 2017. He called her "low I.Q. Crazy Mika" and wrote that she had been "bleeding badly from a face-lift" during a New Year's Eve party.In October of last year, the president started telling his aides that he planned to denounce Stormy Daniels, a pornographic-film actress who claimed to have had an affair with him more than a decade earlier. He said he wanted to call her a "horse face."Several current and former aides recalled telling Trump that it was a terrible idea and would renew accusations of misogyny against him. But he persisted.Finally, after watching a Fox News report days later about how a federal judge had thrown out a lawsuit by Daniels, the president tapped out the tweet."Great, now I can go after Horseface and her 3rd rate lawyer in the Great State of Texas," he wrote.A Love of 'Likes'For Trump, Twitter reinforces his instincts about his performance as president.After a rally in Dallas in mid-October, Trump's aides prepared a large-type printout of tweets gushing over his speech that day, including one from Tomi Lahren, a Fox News commentator and host of a show on the Fox Nation site. Trump scrawled a thank-you note on one copy to Lahren -- who then tweeted a picture of the letter back at the president.Aides said they often compiled positive feedback for Trump. He revels in the stream of praise from his most loyal followers on paper or as he scrolls through his phone early in the morning and late at night. He considers his following to be like the ratings on a TV show, better than any approval poll. After one weekend Twitter spree, the president told Sarah Huckabee Sanders, his press secretary at the time, he had expected a tweet he was particularly proud of to get more response than it did, according to a former administration official. Sanders said that if he tweeted 60 times, people wouldn't pay as much attention, the official said.The president is keenly aware of his number of followers and reluctant to acknowledge that any of them are not real. Trump has accused Twitter of political bias for its periodic purges of bot accounts across the platform, which have cost him -- and other prominent users -- hundreds of thousands of followers. When he met with the company's chief executive, Jack Dorsey, in April, Trump reportedly pressed him at length about the lost followers.There is plenty of evidence that Trump's Twitter following may not be a reliable proxy for what the American people think of the job he is doing.It is difficult, if not impossible, to determine with certainty how many of Trump's more than 66 million followers are fake. Some studies of his followers have estimated that a high proportion are likely to be automated bots, fake accounts or inactive. But even a conservative analysis by the Times found that nearly a third of them, about 22 million, included no biographical information and used the service's default profile image -- two signs the accounts may be rarely used or inactive. Fourteen percent have automatically generated user names, another indication that an account may not belong to a real person.Even if Trump is not shouting into the void on Twitter, he is often preaching to the converted. Data from Stirista, an analytics firm, shows that his followers tend to be the kind of users who are most likely to be his supporters -- disproportionately older, white and male compared with Twitter users overall.And they constitute just a fraction of the electorate. According to the Times analysis of Pew data, only about 4% of American adults, or about 11 million people, follow him on Twitter. Those followers represent less that one-fifth of his total, the analysis shows.According to data from YouGov, which polls about most of the president's tweets, some of the topics on which Trump got the most likes and retweets -- jabs at the NFL, posts about the special counsel's investigation, unfounded allegations of widespread voter fraud -- poll poorly with the general public.But people close to Trump said there was no dissuading him that the "likes" a tweet got were evidence that a decision or policy proposal was well received.Last December, after Trump announced plans to withdraw some troops from Syria, lawmakers came to the White House to argue against it. According to Politico, Trump responded by calling in Scavino."Tell them how popular my policy is," Trump asked Scavino, who described for the lawmakers social media postings that had praised Trump's decision. Aides said that for Trump, his Twitter "likes" were proof that he had made the right call.The reaction in the outside world was far less favorable. Within weeks, Trump's defense secretary and the special anti-ISIS envoy quit over the decision. U.S. allies were enraged. More than two-thirds of the Senate voted to rebuke Trump, who agreed under pressure to keep the troops in Syria.Almost a year later, U.S. troops in Syria became an issue again after Trump appeared to give President Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey a green light to invade Kurdish-controlled areas in northern Syria.That resulted in another congressional rebuke for Trump and complaints even from loyal Republican allies. In subsequent days, Trump sought to defend himself on Twitter, alternately denying he had abandoned the Kurds and suggesting the United States had no stake in their safety, threatening Erdogan if the incursion continued and praising Turkey as an important trading partner.Many people took note of the back-and-forth, including Erdogan. "When we take a look at Mr. Trump's Twitter posts, we can no longer follow them," the Turkish president told reporters mockingly in mid-October, according to Hurriyet, a Turkish newspaper. "We cannot keep track."A Tool for ReelectionIn the months ahead, the man tasked with winning Trump a second term is hoping to focus the president's Twitter habit on its original purpose: connecting with voters.Brad Parscale, who served as Trump's digital director in 2016 and is now campaign manager, has worked closely with Scavino to shape perceptions of the president through social media. The two men speak a half-dozen times a day, according to people familiar with their interactions.Parscale criticized Twitter after it announced Wednesday that it would no longer allow paid political advertising on the platform, calling it "yet another attempt to silence conservatives." But the change may benefit Trump: He has a far larger organic Twitter following than any of his likely Democratic opponents and is therefore less reliant on paid ads to spread his message through the platform.While some campaign aides said Trump's tweets can be a distraction, they also view Twitter as an essential tool to present him as someone strong, willing to stand up to so-called political elites and what the president recently called the "unholy alliance of corrupt Democrat politicians, deep-state bureaucrats and the fake-news media."The aides seek to cultivate the image of a man who understands "regular people." Trump's team believes that his unvarnished writing, poor punctuation and increasing profanity on Twitter signals authenticity -- a contrast to the polished, vetted, often anodyne social media style of most candidates.Twitter, Conway said, is the president's most potent weapon when it comes to bypassing the powerful people he believes have controlled the flow of information too long."It's the democratization of information," she said. Everyone receives Trump's tweets at once -- the stay-at-home mom, the plumber working on the sink, the billionaire executive, the White House correspondent."They all hear 'ping,'" she said, "at the same time."----MethodologyThe New York Times reviewed every tweet and retweet sent by President Donald Trump from Jan. 20, 2017, through Oct. 15, 2019. Each one was evaluated and tagged for several factors: whether it included an attack or praise; who or what was attacked or praised; and for topics including trade, immigration, the military, the economy, the 2018 midterm elections, the Russia investigation and the House impeachment inquiry. In the Times analysis, retweets in each of those categories were counted as tweets.The Times reviewed each Twitter account that followed Trump by analyzing profile information, tweet frequency and the date the account was created. The Times also used data from Pew Research to estimate how many American adults follow Trump on Twitter. Pew Research conducted a nationally representative sample of American adults with personal, public Twitter accounts to analyze how many follow American politicians.This article originally appeared in The New York Times.(C) 2019 The New York Times Company

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In the Oval Office, an annoyed President Donald Trump ended an argument he was having with his aides. He reached into a drawer, took out his iPhone and threw it on top of the historic Resolute Desk:"Do you want me to settle this right now?"There was no missing Trump's threat that day in early 2017, the aides recalled. With a tweet, he could fling a directive to the world, and there was nothing they could do about it.When Trump entered office, Twitter was a political tool that had helped get him elected and a digital howitzer that he relished firing. In the years since, he has fully integrated Twitter into the very fabric of his administration, reshaping the nature of the presidency and presidential power.After Turkey invaded northern Syria this past month, he crafted his response not only in White House meetings but also in a series of contradictory tweets. This summer, he announced increased tariffs on $300 billion worth of Chinese goods, using a tweet to deepen tensions between the two countries. And in March, Trump cast aside more than 50 years of U.S. policy, tweeting his recognition of Israel's sovereignty in the Golan Heights. He openly delighted in the reaction he provoked."Boom. I press it," Trump recalled months later at a White House conference attended by conservative social media personalities, "and, within two seconds, 'We have breaking news.'"Early on, top aides wanted to restrain the president's Twitter habit, even considering asking the company to impose a 15-minute delay on Trump's messages. But 11,390 presidential tweets later, many administration officials and lawmakers embrace his Twitter obsession, flocking to his social media chief with suggestions. Policy meetings are hijacked when Trump gets an idea for a tweet, drawing in cabinet members and others for wordsmithing. And as a president often at war with his own bureaucracy, he deploys Twitter to break through logjams, overrule or humiliate recalcitrant advisers and preempt his staff."He needs to tweet like we need to eat," Kellyanne Conway, his White House counselor, said in an interview.In a presidency unlike any other, where Trump wakes to Twitter, goes to bed with it and is comforted by how much it revolves around him, the person he most often singled out for praise was himself -- more than 2,000 times, according to an analysis by The New York Times.The Times examined Trump's use of Twitter since taking office, reviewing all his tweets, retweets and followers and interviewing nearly 50 current and former administration officials, lawmakers and Twitter executives and employees. What has emerged is a rich account, with new analysis, previously unreported episodes and fresh details of how the president exploits the platform to exert power.It is often by brute repetition. He has taken to Twitter to demand action 1,159 times on immigration and his border wall, a top priority, and 521 times on tariffs, another key agenda item. Twitter is an instrument of his foreign policy: He has praised dictators more than a hundred times, while complaining nearly twice as much about the U.S.' traditional allies. Twitter is the Trump administration's de facto personnel office: The chief executive has announced the departures of more than two dozen top officials, some fired by tweet.More than half of the president's posts -- 5,889 -- have been attacks; no other category even comes close. His targets include the Russia investigation, a Federal Reserve that won't bow to his whims, previous administrations, entire cities that are led by Democrats, and adversaries from outspoken athletes to chief executives who displease him. Like no other modern president, Trump has publicly harangued businesses to advance his political goals and silence criticism, often with talk of government intervention. Using Twitter, he threatened "Saturday Night Live" with an investigation by the Federal Communications Commission and accused Amazon, led by Jeff Bezos, owner of The Washington Post, of cheating the U.S. Postal Service.As much as anything, Twitter is the broadcast network for Trump's parallel political reality -- the "alternative facts" he has used to spread conspiracy theories, fake information and extremist content, including material that energizes some of his base.Trump's use of Twitter has accelerated sharply since the end of the special counsel's Russia investigation and reached a new high as Democrats opened an impeachment inquiry, the analysis shows. He tweeted more than 500 times during the first two weeks of October, a pace that put him on track to triple his monthly average. (The Times analyzed Trump's tweets through Oct. 15. The total by the end of the month reached 11,887.)His more than 66 million Twitter followers have become his private polling service, offering what he sees as validation for his performance in office. But fewer than one-fifth of his followers are voting-age Americans, according to a Times analysis of Pew Research national surveys of adults who use Twitter.The White House press office declined to comment for this article and turned down an interview request with the president. Now, as Trump anticipates a bitter reelection battle and faces an impeachment inquiry by Democrats, the stakes are higher than ever before, and Twitter even more central to his presidency.His top campaign aides are embracing the outrage that Trump stirs with his tweets to reinforce his anti-establishment brand and strengthen his bond with the fiercely loyal supporters who propelled him into office. And as public backing for impeachment grows, the president is using the platform to build a defensive echo chamber.While people around Trump acknowledge that his tweets can cause political damage, the president is confident in his mastery of Twitter.This past week, as he announced that U.S. Special Forces had killed Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, leader of the Islamic State, Trump noted the terror group's digital prowess. "They use the internet better than almost anybody in the world," he said. "Perhaps other than Donald Trump."Policy Via TwitterWith a single tweet last fall, Trump sent his administration into a tailspin. "I must, in the strongest of terms, ask Mexico to stop this onslaught," he wrote in October 2018, angry about a caravan of migrants from Central America. "If unable to do so I will call up the U.S. Military and CLOSE OUR SOUTHERN BORDER!"Trump's aides had tried for weeks to talk him out of shutting down the border; the logistics would be impossible and the economic pain extreme. The tweet prompted an emergency meeting down the hall from the Oval Office as aides scrambled to head off Trump's impulse, according to people familiar with the frantic scene. Like others in this article, they spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of angering the president.The aides succeeded in temporarily holding him off, but the tweet crystallized for cautious bureaucrats exactly what he wanted: to stop people from coming into the country. In the months that followed, Trump's threat helped to set off an effort inside the government to find ever more restrictive ways to block immigrants. Nearly six months later, Kirstjen Nielsen, homeland security secretary, was still trying to prevent a border shutdown when the president brought her resistance to an end."Kirstjen Nielsen," he tweeted, "will be leaving her position."This is governing in the Trump era. For President Barack Obama, a tweet about a presidential proposal might mark the conclusion of a long, deliberative process. For Trump, Twitter is often the beginning of how policy is made."Suddenly there's a tweet, and everything gets upended, and you spent the week trying to defend something else," said Rep. Peter King, R-N.Y. "This person thrives on chaos. What we may find disconcerting or upsetting or whatever, it is actually what keeps him going."In October 2017, Rex Tillerson, the president's first secretary of state, was in China with a team of diplomats negotiating sanctions on Kim Jong Un, the North Korean leader, when Trump weighed in on Twitter. Tillerson was "wasting his time trying to negotiate with Little Rocket Man," he wrote. "Save your energy Rex, we'll do what has to be done!"Two months later, a Reuters headline blared that Mick Mulvaney, who then was Trump's new pick to lead the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, had decided to put "on ice" sanctions against Wells Fargo for consumer abuses. It was little surprise: Mulvaney was an ally of the financial industry. But Trump had other ideas."Fines and penalties against Wells Fargo Bank for their bad acts against their customers and others will not be dropped, as has incorrectly been reported, but will be pursued and, if anything, substantially increased," he tweeted.Political appointees at the bureau wanted to affirm Trump's desire publicly, despite long-standing policies against commenting on active investigations, according to former officials there. A spokesman for Mulvaney issued a statement saying only that he "shares the president's firm commitment to punishing bad actors and protecting American consumers."According to two people with direct knowledge of the Wells Fargo inquiry, career bureau officials took Trump's outburst as a green light to pursue aggressive negotiations with the bank, even as Mulvaney's team prepared to dial back penalties in other cases or shelve them. Wells Fargo ultimately agreed to a billion-dollar federal settlement, the bureau's largest-ever civil penalty.Over time, Trump has turned Twitter into a means of presidential communication as vital as a statement from the White House press secretary or an Oval Office address. The press secretary has not held a daily on-camera press briefing -- a decadeslong ritual of presidential messaging -- since March. Instead, Trump's Twitter activity drives the day.And Trump has removed any doubt that his tweets carry the weight once reserved for more formal pronouncements.In summer 2018, his aides repeatedly tried to reassure Republican lawmakers that the president backed their hard-line immigration bill, despite his remarks suggesting otherwise. But privately, Trump told several senators that there was only one certain sign of his support."If I don't tweet it," he said, according to two former senior advisers, "don't listen to my staff."Adapting a PlatformWhen Trump entered office, aides were determined to rein in his itchy Twitter fingers.In a series of informal conversations in early 2017, top White House officials discussed the possibility of a 15-minute delay on the president's account, a technical change not unlike the five-second naughty-word system used by television networks. But, one former senior official said, they quickly abandoned the idea after recognizing the political peril if it leaked to the press -- or to their boss.Several weeks later, a trio of close advisers presented Trump with another idea. Gary Cohn, the top economic adviser; Hope Hicks, the president's director of strategic communications; and Rob Porter, his staff secretary, argued that they should see the tweets before he sent them out.Trump was skeptical, worrying that delayed tweets would be irrelevant, according to a former White House official. But he agreed to a weeklong trial. Within 72 hours, the president had resumed tweeting from his golf club in Bedminster, New Jersey.Three thousand miles away, in Silicon Valley, similar conversations were unfolding at Twitter's offices, where executives faced the same dilemma as Trump's inner circle: whether, and how, to restrain him.At the time, Twitter lagged far behind larger competitors like Facebook. While popular among politicians and journalists, it was struggling financially. But the president's incessant tweeting gave the company more currency.His Twitter account often drove more "impressions" -- a key company metric -- than any other in the world. But some of his messages seemed to violate the company's policies against abuse and incitement.On a now-defunct internal company message board known as Twitter Buzz, some left-leaning employees favored barring the president. Trump's behavior came up at almost every all-hands gathering and at many smaller meetings of executives. Some of them had set their phones to alert them whenever the president tweeted, according to a former employee who spoke on the condition of confidentiality."What I saw was a company coming to grips with an entirely new situation, a new level of scrutiny, a new level of vitriol," said Dianna Colasurdo, a former account executive on Twitter's political advertising sales team, "and working to adapt their policies in the moment to align with that."A turning point came in fall 2017, at the height of tensions with North Korea, when Trump tweeted that the rogue nation might not "be around much longer!" The country's foreign minister called that a declaration of war. On Twitter, users wondered if the company would allow Trump to tweet his way into a nuclear conflict.The response came the next day. Referring back to Trump's online declaration, Twitter announced in a tweet that it took "newsworthiness" into account when evaluating whether to remove a post that violated its policies.In an interview, Twitter executives said that newsworthiness had long figured into the company's internal enforcement guidelines and that officials there had been formulating the announcement, which applied worldwide, months before Trump's North Korea tweet. But former employees said they understood the announcement to be Trump-driven. Twitter did not want to be in the business of censoring the president.Late in summer 2018, White House insiders tried again to curb Trump's use of social media, according to two former aides. After a series of over-the-top weeks of tweeting -- including calling Omarosa Manigault Newman, his onetime aide, "wacky" and "a lowlife" -- several advisers suggested he go just two days without Twitter and see what happened. Trump nodded and then promptly discarded the advice.King, who said most of his Republican colleagues wished the president would tweet less, added that whenever he had raised the issue with White House staff members, they shrugged helplessly."It's not going to stop," he recalled their saying. "Forget it; we've all tried."Soon enough, Trump was as prolific as ever.On Sept. 13, he mocked Jamie Dimon, chief executive of JPMorgan Chase, for claiming he could beat Trump in an election. "He doesn't have the aptitude or 'smarts' & is a poor public speaker & nervous mess," the president tweeted. Over the next 12 hours, Trump attacked two former FBI officials, accused The Wall Street Journal of getting a tariff story wrong and blasted former Secretary of State John Kerry for holding "illegal meetings" with Iran."BAD!" he wrote.First Things FirstTrump's Twitter habit is most intense in the morning, when he is in the White House residence, watching Fox News, scrolling through his Twitter mentions and turning the social media platform into what one aide called the "ultimate weapon of mass dissemination."Of the attack tweets identified in the Times analysis, nearly half were sent between 6 a.m. and 10 a.m., hours that Trump spends mostly without advisers present.After waking early, Trump typically watches news shows recorded the previous night on his "Super TiVo," several DVRs connected to a single remote. (The devices are set to record "Lou Dobbs Tonight" on Fox Business Network; "Hannity," "Tucker Carlson Tonight" and "The Story With Martha MacCallum" on Fox News; and "Anderson Cooper 360" on CNN.)He takes in those shows and the "Fox & Friends" morning program, then flings out comments on his iPhone. Then he watches as his tweets reverberate on cable channels and news sites.Early on Sept. 2 -- the start of a week in which he tweeted 198 times -- the president sent a few benign tweets, then lashed out at Paul Krugman as a "Failing New York Times columnist" who "never got it!" Over the next 44 minutes, he fired off 10 more tweets. He disparaged Richard Trumka, president of the AFL-CIO ("Likes what we are doing until the cameras go on.") He called James Comey, the former FBI director, and his "dwindling group of friends" liars and traitors. He railed against The Washington Post and four women of color in Congress who called themselves "the Squad."Almost every morning that week, Trump kicked off the day with an attack on one critic or another: the "incompetent Mayor of London," or "Bad 'actress' Debra The Mess Messing" -- whom he accused of being racist -- or the "Fake News Media." He referred to conservative media outlets 45 times, berated the mainstream media 32 times and tweeted about conspiracy theories 12 times.Sometimes the president's apparent fury on Twitter is meant to troll his critics and get a rise out of them, many of his closest aides said. But they still brace themselves, knowing that they are likely to be blindsided by one of his tweets. Aides who gather for the early-morning staff meetings in the West Wing said their agenda was regularly blown up when their phones simultaneously went off with a tweet from the boss.Once Trump arrives in the West Wing -- usually after 10 a.m. -- Dan Scavino, White House social media director, takes control of the Twitter account, tweeting as @realDonaldTrump from his own phone or computer. Trump rarely tweets in front of others, those close to him said, because he does not like to wear the reading glasses he needs to see the screen.Instead, the president dictates tweets to Scavino, who sits in a closet-size room just off the Oval Office until Trump calls out "Scavino!" Often, he prints out suggested tweets in extra-large fonts for the president to sign off on. (A single-page article that Scavino recently printed out for him ran to six pages after the fonts were enlarged, according to one person who saw it.)Scavino's role in Trump's Twitter machine has made him an unlikely White House power broker and the go-to person for aides, business executives, friends and lawmakers who want the president to tweet something. Conway noted what she called the hypocrisy of many Republicans who begged her to get Trump to stop tweeting during the 2016 campaign and now come to Scavino with suggestions. Scavino declined to be interviewed for this article.He sometimes acts as a brake -- or tries to -- on the president's tweeting impulses. When Trump started angrily posting about the "Squad," Scavino told him it was a bad idea, according to an aide who witnessed the conversation. Along with Michael Dubke, who served as White House communications director for several months in 2017 and is from Buffalo, New York, home of the famous chicken wings, Scavino presented some tweets to Trump in degrees of outrageousness: "hot," "medium" or "mild." Trump, said one former official who saw the proposed messages, always picked the most incendiary ones and often wanted to make them even more provocative.And while many of Trump's tweets are shoot-from-the-hip attacks, he chews over others for days or even weeks, waiting for just the right moment to maximize the reaction, aides said.He plotted for days to tweet about Mika Brzezinski, liberal co-host of the popular MSNBC morning program, according to former White House officials, before finally posting one morning in June 2017. He called her "low I.Q. Crazy Mika" and wrote that she had been "bleeding badly from a face-lift" during a New Year's Eve party.In October of last year, the president started telling his aides that he planned to denounce Stormy Daniels, a pornographic-film actress who claimed to have had an affair with him more than a decade earlier. He said he wanted to call her a "horse face."Several current and former aides recalled telling Trump that it was a terrible idea and would renew accusations of misogyny against him. But he persisted.Finally, after watching a Fox News report days later about how a federal judge had thrown out a lawsuit by Daniels, the president tapped out the tweet."Great, now I can go after Horseface and her 3rd rate lawyer in the Great State of Texas," he wrote.A Love of 'Likes'For Trump, Twitter reinforces his instincts about his performance as president.After a rally in Dallas in mid-October, Trump's aides prepared a large-type printout of tweets gushing over his speech that day, including one from Tomi Lahren, a Fox News commentator and host of a show on the Fox Nation site. Trump scrawled a thank-you note on one copy to Lahren -- who then tweeted a picture of the letter back at the president.Aides said they often compiled positive feedback for Trump. He revels in the stream of praise from his most loyal followers on paper or as he scrolls through his phone early in the morning and late at night. He considers his following to be like the ratings on a TV show, better than any approval poll. After one weekend Twitter spree, the president told Sarah Huckabee Sanders, his press secretary at the time, he had expected a tweet he was particularly proud of to get more response than it did, according to a former administration official. Sanders said that if he tweeted 60 times, people wouldn't pay as much attention, the official said.The president is keenly aware of his number of followers and reluctant to acknowledge that any of them are not real. Trump has accused Twitter of political bias for its periodic purges of bot accounts across the platform, which have cost him -- and other prominent users -- hundreds of thousands of followers. When he met with the company's chief executive, Jack Dorsey, in April, Trump reportedly pressed him at length about the lost followers.There is plenty of evidence that Trump's Twitter following may not be a reliable proxy for what the American people think of the job he is doing.It is difficult, if not impossible, to determine with certainty how many of Trump's more than 66 million followers are fake. Some studies of his followers have estimated that a high proportion are likely to be automated bots, fake accounts or inactive. But even a conservative analysis by the Times found that nearly a third of them, about 22 million, included no biographical information and used the service's default profile image -- two signs the accounts may be rarely used or inactive. Fourteen percent have automatically generated user names, another indication that an account may not belong to a real person.Even if Trump is not shouting into the void on Twitter, he is often preaching to the converted. Data from Stirista, an analytics firm, shows that his followers tend to be the kind of users who are most likely to be his supporters -- disproportionately older, white and male compared with Twitter users overall.And they constitute just a fraction of the electorate. According to the Times analysis of Pew data, only about 4% of American adults, or about 11 million people, follow him on Twitter. Those followers represent less that one-fifth of his total, the analysis shows.According to data from YouGov, which polls about most of the president's tweets, some of the topics on which Trump got the most likes and retweets -- jabs at the NFL, posts about the special counsel's investigation, unfounded allegations of widespread voter fraud -- poll poorly with the general public.But people close to Trump said there was no dissuading him that the "likes" a tweet got were evidence that a decision or policy proposal was well received.Last December, after Trump announced plans to withdraw some troops from Syria, lawmakers came to the White House to argue against it. According to Politico, Trump responded by calling in Scavino."Tell them how popular my policy is," Trump asked Scavino, who described for the lawmakers social media postings that had praised Trump's decision. Aides said that for Trump, his Twitter "likes" were proof that he had made the right call.The reaction in the outside world was far less favorable. Within weeks, Trump's defense secretary and the special anti-ISIS envoy quit over the decision. U.S. allies were enraged. More than two-thirds of the Senate voted to rebuke Trump, who agreed under pressure to keep the troops in Syria.Almost a year later, U.S. troops in Syria became an issue again after Trump appeared to give President Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey a green light to invade Kurdish-controlled areas in northern Syria.That resulted in another congressional rebuke for Trump and complaints even from loyal Republican allies. In subsequent days, Trump sought to defend himself on Twitter, alternately denying he had abandoned the Kurds and suggesting the United States had no stake in their safety, threatening Erdogan if the incursion continued and praising Turkey as an important trading partner.Many people took note of the back-and-forth, including Erdogan. "When we take a look at Mr. Trump's Twitter posts, we can no longer follow them," the Turkish president told reporters mockingly in mid-October, according to Hurriyet, a Turkish newspaper. "We cannot keep track."A Tool for ReelectionIn the months ahead, the man tasked with winning Trump a second term is hoping to focus the president's Twitter habit on its original purpose: connecting with voters.Brad Parscale, who served as Trump's digital director in 2016 and is now campaign manager, has worked closely with Scavino to shape perceptions of the president through social media. The two men speak a half-dozen times a day, according to people familiar with their interactions.Parscale criticized Twitter after it announced Wednesday that it would no longer allow paid political advertising on the platform, calling it "yet another attempt to silence conservatives." But the change may benefit Trump: He has a far larger organic Twitter following than any of his likely Democratic opponents and is therefore less reliant on paid ads to spread his message through the platform.While some campaign aides said Trump's tweets can be a distraction, they also view Twitter as an essential tool to present him as someone strong, willing to stand up to so-called political elites and what the president recently called the "unholy alliance of corrupt Democrat politicians, deep-state bureaucrats and the fake-news media."The aides seek to cultivate the image of a man who understands "regular people." Trump's team believes that his unvarnished writing, poor punctuation and increasing profanity on Twitter signals authenticity -- a contrast to the polished, vetted, often anodyne social media style of most candidates.Twitter, Conway said, is the president's most potent weapon when it comes to bypassing the powerful people he believes have controlled the flow of information too long."It's the democratization of information," she said. Everyone receives Trump's tweets at once -- the stay-at-home mom, the plumber working on the sink, the billionaire executive, the White House correspondent."They all hear 'ping,'" she said, "at the same time."----MethodologyThe New York Times reviewed every tweet and retweet sent by President Donald Trump from Jan. 20, 2017, through Oct. 15, 2019. Each one was evaluated and tagged for several factors: whether it included an attack or praise; who or what was attacked or praised; and for topics including trade, immigration, the military, the economy, the 2018 midterm elections, the Russia investigation and the House impeachment inquiry. In the Times analysis, retweets in each of those categories were counted as tweets.The Times reviewed each Twitter account that followed Trump by analyzing profile information, tweet frequency and the date the account was created. The Times also used data from Pew Research to estimate how many American adults follow Trump on Twitter. Pew Research conducted a nationally representative sample of American adults with personal, public Twitter accounts to analyze how many follow American politicians.This article originally appeared in The New York Times.(C) 2019 The New York Times Company

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In the Oval Office, an annoyed President Donald Trump ended an argument he was having with his aides. He reached into a drawer, took out his iPhone and threw it on top of the historic Resolute Desk:"Do you want me to settle this right now?"There was no missing Trump's threat that day in early 2017, the aides recalled. With a tweet, he could fling a directive to the world, and there was nothing they could do about it.When Trump entered office, Twitter was a political tool that had helped get him elected and a digital howitzer that he relished firing. In the years since, he has fully integrated Twitter into the very fabric of his administration, reshaping the nature of the presidency and presidential power.After Turkey invaded northern Syria this past month, he crafted his response not only in White House meetings but also in a series of contradictory tweets. This summer, he announced increased tariffs on $300 billion worth of Chinese goods, using a tweet to deepen tensions between the two countries. And in March, Trump cast aside more than 50 years of U.S. policy, tweeting his recognition of Israel's sovereignty in the Golan Heights. He openly delighted in the reaction he provoked."Boom. I press it," Trump recalled months later at a White House conference attended by conservative social media personalities, "and, within two seconds, 'We have breaking news.'"Early on, top aides wanted to restrain the president's Twitter habit, even considering asking the company to impose a 15-minute delay on Trump's messages. But 11,390 presidential tweets later, many administration officials and lawmakers embrace his Twitter obsession, flocking to his social media chief with suggestions. Policy meetings are hijacked when Trump gets an idea for a tweet, drawing in cabinet members and others for wordsmithing. And as a president often at war with his own bureaucracy, he deploys Twitter to break through logjams, overrule or humiliate recalcitrant advisers and preempt his staff."He needs to tweet like we need to eat," Kellyanne Conway, his White House counselor, said in an interview.In a presidency unlike any other, where Trump wakes to Twitter, goes to bed with it and is comforted by how much it revolves around him, the person he most often singled out for praise was himself -- more than 2,000 times, according to an analysis by The New York Times.The Times examined Trump's use of Twitter since taking office, reviewing all his tweets, retweets and followers and interviewing nearly 50 current and former administration officials, lawmakers and Twitter executives and employees. What has emerged is a rich account, with new analysis, previously unreported episodes and fresh details of how the president exploits the platform to exert power.It is often by brute repetition. He has taken to Twitter to demand action 1,159 times on immigration and his border wall, a top priority, and 521 times on tariffs, another key agenda item. Twitter is an instrument of his foreign policy: He has praised dictators more than a hundred times, while complaining nearly twice as much about the U.S.' traditional allies. Twitter is the Trump administration's de facto personnel office: The chief executive has announced the departures of more than two dozen top officials, some fired by tweet.More than half of the president's posts -- 5,889 -- have been attacks; no other category even comes close. His targets include the Russia investigation, a Federal Reserve that won't bow to his whims, previous administrations, entire cities that are led by Democrats, and adversaries from outspoken athletes to chief executives who displease him. Like no other modern president, Trump has publicly harangued businesses to advance his political goals and silence criticism, often with talk of government intervention. Using Twitter, he threatened "Saturday Night Live" with an investigation by the Federal Communications Commission and accused Amazon, led by Jeff Bezos, owner of The Washington Post, of cheating the U.S. Postal Service.As much as anything, Twitter is the broadcast network for Trump's parallel political reality -- the "alternative facts" he has used to spread conspiracy theories, fake information and extremist content, including material that energizes some of his base.Trump's use of Twitter has accelerated sharply since the end of the special counsel's Russia investigation and reached a new high as Democrats opened an impeachment inquiry, the analysis shows. He tweeted more than 500 times during the first two weeks of October, a pace that put him on track to triple his monthly average. (The Times analyzed Trump's tweets through Oct. 15. The total by the end of the month reached 11,887.)His more than 66 million Twitter followers have become his private polling service, offering what he sees as validation for his performance in office. But fewer than one-fifth of his followers are voting-age Americans, according to a Times analysis of Pew Research national surveys of adults who use Twitter.The White House press office declined to comment for this article and turned down an interview request with the president. Now, as Trump anticipates a bitter reelection battle and faces an impeachment inquiry by Democrats, the stakes are higher than ever before, and Twitter even more central to his presidency.His top campaign aides are embracing the outrage that Trump stirs with his tweets to reinforce his anti-establishment brand and strengthen his bond with the fiercely loyal supporters who propelled him into office. And as public backing for impeachment grows, the president is using the platform to build a defensive echo chamber.While people around Trump acknowledge that his tweets can cause political damage, the president is confident in his mastery of Twitter.This past week, as he announced that U.S. Special Forces had killed Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, leader of the Islamic State, Trump noted the terror group's digital prowess. "They use the internet better than almost anybody in the world," he said. "Perhaps other than Donald Trump."Policy Via TwitterWith a single tweet last fall, Trump sent his administration into a tailspin. "I must, in the strongest of terms, ask Mexico to stop this onslaught," he wrote in October 2018, angry about a caravan of migrants from Central America. "If unable to do so I will call up the U.S. Military and CLOSE OUR SOUTHERN BORDER!"Trump's aides had tried for weeks to talk him out of shutting down the border; the logistics would be impossible and the economic pain extreme. The tweet prompted an emergency meeting down the hall from the Oval Office as aides scrambled to head off Trump's impulse, according to people familiar with the frantic scene. Like others in this article, they spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of angering the president.The aides succeeded in temporarily holding him off, but the tweet crystallized for cautious bureaucrats exactly what he wanted: to stop people from coming into the country. In the months that followed, Trump's threat helped to set off an effort inside the government to find ever more restrictive ways to block immigrants. Nearly six months later, Kirstjen Nielsen, homeland security secretary, was still trying to prevent a border shutdown when the president brought her resistance to an end."Kirstjen Nielsen," he tweeted, "will be leaving her position."This is governing in the Trump era. For President Barack Obama, a tweet about a presidential proposal might mark the conclusion of a long, deliberative process. For Trump, Twitter is often the beginning of how policy is made."Suddenly there's a tweet, and everything gets upended, and you spent the week trying to defend something else," said Rep. Peter King, R-N.Y. "This person thrives on chaos. What we may find disconcerting or upsetting or whatever, it is actually what keeps him going."In October 2017, Rex Tillerson, the president's first secretary of state, was in China with a team of diplomats negotiating sanctions on Kim Jong Un, the North Korean leader, when Trump weighed in on Twitter. Tillerson was "wasting his time trying to negotiate with Little Rocket Man," he wrote. "Save your energy Rex, we'll do what has to be done!"Two months later, a Reuters headline blared that Mick Mulvaney, who then was Trump's new pick to lead the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, had decided to put "on ice" sanctions against Wells Fargo for consumer abuses. It was little surprise: Mulvaney was an ally of the financial industry. But Trump had other ideas."Fines and penalties against Wells Fargo Bank for their bad acts against their customers and others will not be dropped, as has incorrectly been reported, but will be pursued and, if anything, substantially increased," he tweeted.Political appointees at the bureau wanted to affirm Trump's desire publicly, despite long-standing policies against commenting on active investigations, according to former officials there. A spokesman for Mulvaney issued a statement saying only that he "shares the president's firm commitment to punishing bad actors and protecting American consumers."According to two people with direct knowledge of the Wells Fargo inquiry, career bureau officials took Trump's outburst as a green light to pursue aggressive negotiations with the bank, even as Mulvaney's team prepared to dial back penalties in other cases or shelve them. Wells Fargo ultimately agreed to a billion-dollar federal settlement, the bureau's largest-ever civil penalty.Over time, Trump has turned Twitter into a means of presidential communication as vital as a statement from the White House press secretary or an Oval Office address. The press secretary has not held a daily on-camera press briefing -- a decadeslong ritual of presidential messaging -- since March. Instead, Trump's Twitter activity drives the day.And Trump has removed any doubt that his tweets carry the weight once reserved for more formal pronouncements.In summer 2018, his aides repeatedly tried to reassure Republican lawmakers that the president backed their hard-line immigration bill, despite his remarks suggesting otherwise. But privately, Trump told several senators that there was only one certain sign of his support."If I don't tweet it," he said, according to two former senior advisers, "don't listen to my staff."Adapting a PlatformWhen Trump entered office, aides were determined to rein in his itchy Twitter fingers.In a series of informal conversations in early 2017, top White House officials discussed the possibility of a 15-minute delay on the president's account, a technical change not unlike the five-second naughty-word system used by television networks. But, one former senior official said, they quickly abandoned the idea after recognizing the political peril if it leaked to the press -- or to their boss.Several weeks later, a trio of close advisers presented Trump with another idea. Gary Cohn, the top economic adviser; Hope Hicks, the president's director of strategic communications; and Rob Porter, his staff secretary, argued that they should see the tweets before he sent them out.Trump was skeptical, worrying that delayed tweets would be irrelevant, according to a former White House official. But he agreed to a weeklong trial. Within 72 hours, the president had resumed tweeting from his golf club in Bedminster, New Jersey.Three thousand miles away, in Silicon Valley, similar conversations were unfolding at Twitter's offices, where executives faced the same dilemma as Trump's inner circle: whether, and how, to restrain him.At the time, Twitter lagged far behind larger competitors like Facebook. While popular among politicians and journalists, it was struggling financially. But the president's incessant tweeting gave the company more currency.His Twitter account often drove more "impressions" -- a key company metric -- than any other in the world. But some of his messages seemed to violate the company's policies against abuse and incitement.On a now-defunct internal company message board known as Twitter Buzz, some left-leaning employees favored barring the president. Trump's behavior came up at almost every all-hands gathering and at many smaller meetings of executives. Some of them had set their phones to alert them whenever the president tweeted, according to a former employee who spoke on the condition of confidentiality."What I saw was a company coming to grips with an entirely new situation, a new level of scrutiny, a new level of vitriol," said Dianna Colasurdo, a former account executive on Twitter's political advertising sales team, "and working to adapt their policies in the moment to align with that."A turning point came in fall 2017, at the height of tensions with North Korea, when Trump tweeted that the rogue nation might not "be around much longer!" The country's foreign minister called that a declaration of war. On Twitter, users wondered if the company would allow Trump to tweet his way into a nuclear conflict.The response came the next day. Referring back to Trump's online declaration, Twitter announced in a tweet that it took "newsworthiness" into account when evaluating whether to remove a post that violated its policies.In an interview, Twitter executives said that newsworthiness had long figured into the company's internal enforcement guidelines and that officials there had been formulating the announcement, which applied worldwide, months before Trump's North Korea tweet. But former employees said they understood the announcement to be Trump-driven. Twitter did not want to be in the business of censoring the president.Late in summer 2018, White House insiders tried again to curb Trump's use of social media, according to two former aides. After a series of over-the-top weeks of tweeting -- including calling Omarosa Manigault Newman, his onetime aide, "wacky" and "a lowlife" -- several advisers suggested he go just two days without Twitter and see what happened. Trump nodded and then promptly discarded the advice.King, who said most of his Republican colleagues wished the president would tweet less, added that whenever he had raised the issue with White House staff members, they shrugged helplessly."It's not going to stop," he recalled their saying. "Forget it; we've all tried."Soon enough, Trump was as prolific as ever.On Sept. 13, he mocked Jamie Dimon, chief executive of JPMorgan Chase, for claiming he could beat Trump in an election. "He doesn't have the aptitude or 'smarts' & is a poor public speaker & nervous mess," the president tweeted. Over the next 12 hours, Trump attacked two former FBI officials, accused The Wall Street Journal of getting a tariff story wrong and blasted former Secretary of State John Kerry for holding "illegal meetings" with Iran."BAD!" he wrote.First Things FirstTrump's Twitter habit is most intense in the morning, when he is in the White House residence, watching Fox News, scrolling through his Twitter mentions and turning the social media platform into what one aide called the "ultimate weapon of mass dissemination."Of the attack tweets identified in the Times analysis, nearly half were sent between 6 a.m. and 10 a.m., hours that Trump spends mostly without advisers present.After waking early, Trump typically watches news shows recorded the previous night on his "Super TiVo," several DVRs connected to a single remote. (The devices are set to record "Lou Dobbs Tonight" on Fox Business Network; "Hannity," "Tucker Carlson Tonight" and "The Story With Martha MacCallum" on Fox News; and "Anderson Cooper 360" on CNN.)He takes in those shows and the "Fox & Friends" morning program, then flings out comments on his iPhone. Then he watches as his tweets reverberate on cable channels and news sites.Early on Sept. 2 -- the start of a week in which he tweeted 198 times -- the president sent a few benign tweets, then lashed out at Paul Krugman as a "Failing New York Times columnist" who "never got it!" Over the next 44 minutes, he fired off 10 more tweets. He disparaged Richard Trumka, president of the AFL-CIO ("Likes what we are doing until the cameras go on.") He called James Comey, the former FBI director, and his "dwindling group of friends" liars and traitors. He railed against The Washington Post and four women of color in Congress who called themselves "the Squad."Almost every morning that week, Trump kicked off the day with an attack on one critic or another: the "incompetent Mayor of London," or "Bad 'actress' Debra The Mess Messing" -- whom he accused of being racist -- or the "Fake News Media." He referred to conservative media outlets 45 times, berated the mainstream media 32 times and tweeted about conspiracy theories 12 times.Sometimes the president's apparent fury on Twitter is meant to troll his critics and get a rise out of them, many of his closest aides said. But they still brace themselves, knowing that they are likely to be blindsided by one of his tweets. Aides who gather for the early-morning staff meetings in the West Wing said their agenda was regularly blown up when their phones simultaneously went off with a tweet from the boss.Once Trump arrives in the West Wing -- usually after 10 a.m. -- Dan Scavino, White House social media director, takes control of the Twitter account, tweeting as @realDonaldTrump from his own phone or computer. Trump rarely tweets in front of others, those close to him said, because he does not like to wear the reading glasses he needs to see the screen.Instead, the president dictates tweets to Scavino, who sits in a closet-size room just off the Oval Office until Trump calls out "Scavino!" Often, he prints out suggested tweets in extra-large fonts for the president to sign off on. (A single-page article that Scavino recently printed out for him ran to six pages after the fonts were enlarged, according to one person who saw it.)Scavino's role in Trump's Twitter machine has made him an unlikely White House power broker and the go-to person for aides, business executives, friends and lawmakers who want the president to tweet something. Conway noted what she called the hypocrisy of many Republicans who begged her to get Trump to stop tweeting during the 2016 campaign and now come to Scavino with suggestions. Scavino declined to be interviewed for this article.He sometimes acts as a brake -- or tries to -- on the president's tweeting impulses. When Trump started angrily posting about the "Squad," Scavino told him it was a bad idea, according to an aide who witnessed the conversation. Along with Michael Dubke, who served as White House communications director for several months in 2017 and is from Buffalo, New York, home of the famous chicken wings, Scavino presented some tweets to Trump in degrees of outrageousness: "hot," "medium" or "mild." Trump, said one former official who saw the proposed messages, always picked the most incendiary ones and often wanted to make them even more provocative.And while many of Trump's tweets are shoot-from-the-hip attacks, he chews over others for days or even weeks, waiting for just the right moment to maximize the reaction, aides said.He plotted for days to tweet about Mika Brzezinski, liberal co-host of the popular MSNBC morning program, according to former White House officials, before finally posting one morning in June 2017. He called her "low I.Q. Crazy Mika" and wrote that she had been "bleeding badly from a face-lift" during a New Year's Eve party.In October of last year, the president started telling his aides that he planned to denounce Stormy Daniels, a pornographic-film actress who claimed to have had an affair with him more than a decade earlier. He said he wanted to call her a "horse face."Several current and former aides recalled telling Trump that it was a terrible idea and would renew accusations of misogyny against him. But he persisted.Finally, after watching a Fox News report days later about how a federal judge had thrown out a lawsuit by Daniels, the president tapped out the tweet."Great, now I can go after Horseface and her 3rd rate lawyer in the Great State of Texas," he wrote.A Love of 'Likes'For Trump, Twitter reinforces his instincts about his performance as president.After a rally in Dallas in mid-October, Trump's aides prepared a large-type printout of tweets gushing over his speech that day, including one from Tomi Lahren, a Fox News commentator and host of a show on the Fox Nation site. Trump scrawled a thank-you note on one copy to Lahren -- who then tweeted a picture of the letter back at the president.Aides said they often compiled positive feedback for Trump. He revels in the stream of praise from his most loyal followers on paper or as he scrolls through his phone early in the morning and late at night. He considers his following to be like the ratings on a TV show, better than any approval poll. After one weekend Twitter spree, the president told Sarah Huckabee Sanders, his press secretary at the time, he had expected a tweet he was particularly proud of to get more response than it did, according to a former administration official. Sanders said that if he tweeted 60 times, people wouldn't pay as much attention, the official said.The president is keenly aware of his number of followers and reluctant to acknowledge that any of them are not real. Trump has accused Twitter of political bias for its periodic purges of bot accounts across the platform, which have cost him -- and other prominent users -- hundreds of thousands of followers. When he met with the company's chief executive, Jack Dorsey, in April, Trump reportedly pressed him at length about the lost followers.There is plenty of evidence that Trump's Twitter following may not be a reliable proxy for what the American people think of the job he is doing.It is difficult, if not impossible, to determine with certainty how many of Trump's more than 66 million followers are fake. Some studies of his followers have estimated that a high proportion are likely to be automated bots, fake accounts or inactive. But even a conservative analysis by the Times found that nearly a third of them, about 22 million, included no biographical information and used the service's default profile image -- two signs the accounts may be rarely used or inactive. Fourteen percent have automatically generated user names, another indication that an account may not belong to a real person.Even if Trump is not shouting into the void on Twitter, he is often preaching to the converted. Data from Stirista, an analytics firm, shows that his followers tend to be the kind of users who are most likely to be his supporters -- disproportionately older, white and male compared with Twitter users overall.And they constitute just a fraction of the electorate. According to the Times analysis of Pew data, only about 4% of American adults, or about 11 million people, follow him on Twitter. Those followers represent less that one-fifth of his total, the analysis shows.According to data from YouGov, which polls about most of the president's tweets, some of the topics on which Trump got the most likes and retweets -- jabs at the NFL, posts about the special counsel's investigation, unfounded allegations of widespread voter fraud -- poll poorly with the general public.But people close to Trump said there was no dissuading him that the "likes" a tweet got were evidence that a decision or policy proposal was well received.Last December, after Trump announced plans to withdraw some troops from Syria, lawmakers came to the White House to argue against it. According to Politico, Trump responded by calling in Scavino."Tell them how popular my policy is," Trump asked Scavino, who described for the lawmakers social media postings that had praised Trump's decision. Aides said that for Trump, his Twitter "likes" were proof that he had made the right call.The reaction in the outside world was far less favorable. Within weeks, Trump's defense secretary and the special anti-ISIS envoy quit over the decision. U.S. allies were enraged. More than two-thirds of the Senate voted to rebuke Trump, who agreed under pressure to keep the troops in Syria.Almost a year later, U.S. troops in Syria became an issue again after Trump appeared to give President Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey a green light to invade Kurdish-controlled areas in northern Syria.That resulted in another congressional rebuke for Trump and complaints even from loyal Republican allies. In subsequent days, Trump sought to defend himself on Twitter, alternately denying he had abandoned the Kurds and suggesting the United States had no stake in their safety, threatening Erdogan if the incursion continued and praising Turkey as an important trading partner.Many people took note of the back-and-forth, including Erdogan. "When we take a look at Mr. Trump's Twitter posts, we can no longer follow them," the Turkish president told reporters mockingly in mid-October, according to Hurriyet, a Turkish newspaper. "We cannot keep track."A Tool for ReelectionIn the months ahead, the man tasked with winning Trump a second term is hoping to focus the president's Twitter habit on its original purpose: connecting with voters.Brad Parscale, who served as Trump's digital director in 2016 and is now campaign manager, has worked closely with Scavino to shape perceptions of the president through social media. The two men speak a half-dozen times a day, according to people familiar with their interactions.Parscale criticized Twitter after it announced Wednesday that it would no longer allow paid political advertising on the platform, calling it "yet another attempt to silence conservatives." But the change may benefit Trump: He has a far larger organic Twitter following than any of his likely Democratic opponents and is therefore less reliant on paid ads to spread his message through the platform.While some campaign aides said Trump's tweets can be a distraction, they also view Twitter as an essential tool to present him as someone strong, willing to stand up to so-called political elites and what the president recently called the "unholy alliance of corrupt Democrat politicians, deep-state bureaucrats and the fake-news media."The aides seek to cultivate the image of a man who understands "regular people." Trump's team believes that his unvarnished writing, poor punctuation and increasing profanity on Twitter signals authenticity -- a contrast to the polished, vetted, often anodyne social media style of most candidates.Twitter, Conway said, is the president's most potent weapon when it comes to bypassing the powerful people he believes have controlled the flow of information too long."It's the democratization of information," she said. Everyone receives Trump's tweets at once -- the stay-at-home mom, the plumber working on the sink, the billionaire executive, the White House correspondent."They all hear 'ping,'" she said, "at the same time."----MethodologyThe New York Times reviewed every tweet and retweet sent by President Donald Trump from Jan. 20, 2017, through Oct. 15, 2019. Each one was evaluated and tagged for several factors: whether it included an attack or praise; who or what was attacked or praised; and for topics including trade, immigration, the military, the economy, the 2018 midterm elections, the Russia investigation and the House impeachment inquiry. In the Times analysis, retweets in each of those categories were counted as tweets.The Times reviewed each Twitter account that followed Trump by analyzing profile information, tweet frequency and the date the account was created. The Times also used data from Pew Research to estimate how many American adults follow Trump on Twitter. Pew Research conducted a nationally representative sample of American adults with personal, public Twitter accounts to analyze how many follow American politicians.This article originally appeared in The New York Times.(C) 2019 The New York Times Company

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