Before being suspended from Twitter (the social network now called active and famous people on the platform. It happened that he published dozens of messages on the most varied topics in a single day, and some of his many tweets they have now entered pop culture: for example the one that ended with the invented word “covfefe”, or the one in which Trump said he had “a nuclear button much bigger and more powerful” than that of the North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un. Even today, many people in the United States and beyond remember and quote some of the expressions that Trump used most frequently, such as the word “Sad!” (“Sad!”) with an exclamation point at the end.
However, it seems that Trump did not particularly like publishing his tweets, on the contrary: he preferred to dictate them to someone, have them printed, correct them and hand them back to an assistant who was finally responsible for posting them. Madeleine Westerhout, Trump’s former personal assistant between 2017 and 2019, said this in recent days during her testimony in the criminal trial underway against him in New York.
The trial revolves around an alleged payment made in 2016 to porn film actress Stormy Daniels, and then not accounted for correctly, to buy her silence about an alleged sexual relationship she had with Trump a decade earlier. Westerhout was called to testify primarily because she claims she helped arrange a meeting in the Oval Office (the ceremonial office of US presidents, in the White House) between Trump and his lawyer Michael Cohen in February 2017, in which according to Westerhout discussed the payment made to Daniels.
Beyond the facts surrounding the allegations against Trump, Westerhout’s story yields interesting details that show how seriously the former president took sharing his thoughts on Twitter. Westerhout said Trump did not use a computer or his own email address, and when he wanted to post something on Twitter he typically asked his top aide, Dan Scavino, to do it for him. When Scavino wasn’t there, however, it could happen that the task fell to her: in those cases he asked her to take notes while he recited the text in her voice. The notes then had to be printed so that he could correct them on paper before they were published.
According to Westerhout, Trump sometimes required several rounds of corrections before he was satisfied enough with his tweet to want to publish it:
There were some words he liked to write with a capital letter, like “Country.” He liked to use exclamation points. And I understood that he liked to put commas before the conjunction.
Westerhout was fired from the White House in 2019 after leaking information about Trump’s family to the press. Today the former president has the ability to post on Twitter again because Elon Musk, who bought the company in October 2022, has rescinded his suspension from the platform. However, Trump prefers to share content on Truth Social, a social network rather similar to Twitter founded by Trump himself and launched in 2022.
In all likelihood, Trump will be the Republican Party’s candidate in the elections on November 5, in which he will run against the current president, Democrat Joe Biden.
– Read also: The day Trump learned to tweet