Sarah Huckabee Sanders caught using Donald Trump’s Twitter account
Weeks ago, after Donald Trump accidentally confessed to felony obstruction of justice with a particularly stupid tweet, he claimed that his attorney had somehow written the tweet. While he was probably lying about this, it did help to confirm what Palmer Report has been documenting for several months: Trump handlers have been periodically tweeting from his account, trying to impersonate him, and failing to various degrees. Now they’ve become rather brazenly sloppy about it.
On Friday evening, Sarah Huckabee Sanders posted this to the @PressSec account on Twitter: “Reports of peaceful protests by Iranian citizens fed up with the regime’s corruption and its squandering of the nation’s wealth to fund terrorism abroad. The Iranian government should respect their people’s rights including their right to express themselves. The world is watching.” Roughly two hours later, this tweet appeared on the @RealDonaldTrump account: “”Many reports of peaceful protests by Iranian citizens fed up with regime’s corruption & its squandering of the nation’s wealth to fund terrorism abroad. Iranian govt should respect their people’s rights, including right to express themselves. The world is watching! #IranProtests”
To be clear, this was not a retweet or quoted tweet. This was an instance of Huckabee Sanders tweeting something to the Press Secretary account, and then later copy-pasting it to Donald Trump’s account, making only a handful of minor changes while leaving nearly all of the verbiage intact. How do we know Trump didn’t merely copycat Huckabee Sanders’ tweet? Some will claim that there’s some other theoretically possible explanation for how this happened, but those explanations will be nonsense. It’s clear what happened here.
This comes just two days after Donald Trump inexplicably retweeted a tweet from his social media director, Dan Scavino, which congratulated an Iowa football team for winning a college bowl game. Trump never does this with any team. This occurred within moments of Trump’s account retweeting tweets from Eric and Ivanka Trump. It’s fairly clear what happened here: Scavino used Trump’s account to retweet two of Trump’s children, and in the process, accidentally retweeted his own tweet about football. Why are Trump’s handlers resorting to impersonating him on Twitter? Has his senility become just that severe?
Bill Palmer is the publisher of the political news outlet Palmer Report