President Donald Trump defended his controversial social media habits on Sunday, calling his tweets “well-crafted” and suggesting he wouldn’t have won the presidency without them.
The 71-year-old Trump has drawn a veritable worth of criticism for many of the inflammatory, divisive, and fallacious tweets he’s sent, both before and after becoming president. But Trump, during his interview with Fox News host Maria Bartiromo on Sunday, insisted that his tweets are important to counter “fake news” and to get his messages out to the media in rapid fashion.
.@POTUS: “I doubt I’d be here if it weren’t for social media…bc there is a fake media out there. I get treated very unfairly by the media” pic.twitter.com/D60lN2avwQ
— Fox News (@FoxNews) October 22, 2017
“Tweeting is like a typewriter. When I put it out, you put it immediately on your show,” Trump told Bartiromo.
Trump also defended the intellectual value and crafting of his tweets, dusting off a familiar argument when discussing himself: his insistence that he was a good student and therefore his words and decision-making are intelligent and savvy.
“You know, they’re well-crafted. I was always a good student, I’m, like, a kind of person who does well with that kind of thing. And I doubt I’d be here if it weren’t for social media, to be honest, because there is a fake media out there. I get treated very unfairly by the media, and I have a tremendous platform. I think I have 125 million people between Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook,” Trump said.
“So when somebody says something about me, I’m able to go ‘bing-bing-bing,’ and I take care of it. The other way, I’d never be able to get the word out.”
If that bing-bing-bing remark sounds familiar, that’s because it’s not the first time Trump’s resorted to an onomatopoeia to try to get his point across. During the 2016 presidential campaign, he did much the same.
Trump’s acknowledgment that he might not have been elected if not for social media and that he likes Twitter because it allows him to rapidly respond to his critics will likely put a charge into those progressives who’ve urged Twitter to suspend his account. There’s absolutely no indication, however, that anyone within the company has ever, or would ever, consider doing that.
