Trump's staff ghostwrites some of his tweets and inserts grammatical errors to make them seem authentic
- West Wing staffers intentionally insert grammatical errors into messages they draft for the president's Twitter account, seeking to mimic his characteristic style, according to the Boston Globe.
- Some staffers reportedly even enjoy the criticism the White House receives over @realDonaldTrump's unconventional language and syntax.
- And the president's aides have become so adept at replicating Trump's Twitter language that algorithms are having difficulty differentiating between authentic and staff-written messages.
West Wing staffers intentionally insert grammatical errors into messages they draft for President Donald Trump's Twitter account, seeking to mimic the president's unconventional style, the Boston Globe reported.
Some staffers reportedly even enjoy the criticism the White House receives over @realDonaldTrump's language and syntax and believe his online voice emphasizes his rejection of the elite, helping him appeal to ordinary Americans.
While the president sometimes deletes tweets that he sends with apparently inadvertent spelling errors - the most infamous perhaps being "covfefe" - his regular, and seemingly random, use of capitalization and exclamation points - among other grammatical quirks - sets his messages apart from those of his predecessors.
The president regularly takes suggestions from his staff on what to tweet about, according to a source familiar with the process who spoke with the Globe. If staffers want the president to send a message about a certain issue, they write a memo to Trump that includes a few sample tweets.
"Tweets that are proposed are in his voice," one source told the Globe. "You want to do it in a way that fits his style."
The Atlantic created an algorithm that uses past Trump tweets to help differentiate between authentic and staff-written tweets, determining the percentage likelihood that a tweet was written by the president.
Andrew McGill, a senior product manager at The Atlantic who created a Twitter account, @TrumpOrNotBot, that employs the algorithm, told the Globe that he believes the algorithm's accuracy is deteriorating because staffers have become more sophisticated in mimicking the president's Twitter style.