On Scavino’s aggressive defense of the president on Twitter
Scavino is yet another individual who was a perfectly normal soul, so it seemed, until he fell down the Trump rabbit hole. As this Westchester County suburbanite, one would never have expected a person like Dan Scavino to become a Donald Trump attack dog, but that is, in fact, what has taken place — both on Trump’s Twitter account and on Dan Scavino’s personal Twitter account. … To the extent that Trump believes in (as he puts it) “counter-punching,” Dan Scavino is very much a part of that counterpunching mechanism.
On which of Trump’s tweets may have been crafted by Scavino
If you look at Trump’s Twitter page, you’ll see, for one thing, a few sort of anodyne things: “I’ll be at such-and-such a place at 1 o’clock.” Trump’s not writing that; Dan Scavino is. …
There are also some tweets that Trump will dictate to Scavino and Scavino will then polish them up, make sure there are no grammatical errors or anything like that. Trump will look at them and then say, “OK, that looks good,” or “No, no. I want you to put this back in.” Then he’ll say, “Go ahead and hit send,” and Scavino will do so. …
There certainly are tweets that Trump himself writes in the dark of night or first thing in the morning that Dan Scavino sees when the rest of the world sees. That’s probably about half of the tweets overall. But of the 37,000 or so tweets that Trump has sent out, Dan Scavino is responsible for — at least as a “co-conspirator” to — about half of those.
On the Trump style of tweeting, with all-caps and exclamation points
Let’s for one thing establish … that none of us are in the room when individual tweets are happening. I would’ve loved to deconstruct a series of tweets for this story and say, “Here’s what Scavino supplied. Here’s what the first draft of this was.” I was unable. It happens to be an intimate act for President Trump … something that all takes place backstage.
Having said all of that, Trump more or less set his own template with the all-caps and saying “Sad!” but Scavino has added to that template. Trump didn’t know how to do a hashtag before [Scavino]. … [Trump] would have a general sentiment, but would lack specifics.
When we look at a Trump tweet, it is, in many ways, an amalgamation of Trump’s basic grievance — the establishment of a grievance or an establishment of a boast, supplied then with a few technical details such as hashtags and things. The all-caps is something Trump has been doing going back to, I’d say, 2012, before Scavino had any access to Trump’s Twitter account. He began, Scavino did, to “co-conspire” with Trump on the @realDonaldTrump Twitter account in 2015. …
