Though President Trump often doesn’t express regret (or apologize, for that matter) he does, however, feel that his Twitter finger fires off one too many stray shots that get him into trouble.
In an interview with David Portnoy, founder of Barstool Sports, the president admitted that he “loves” Twitter a little too much sometimes, a love that “often” gets him “into trouble.”
“Do you sometimes — because I follow you on Twitter and I know I do this… do you ever tweet out and be like — you wake up and, ‘Aw man, I wish I didn’t send that one out’?” Portnoy asked, as reported by Fox News.
“Often, too often,” Trump responded. “It used to be in the old days before this, you’d write a letter and you’d say this letter is very big. You put it on your desk and then you go back tomorrow and you say, ‘Oh, I’m glad I didn’t send it,’ right? But we don’t do that with Twitter, right? We put it out instantaneously, we feel great, and then you start getting phone calls — ‘Did you really say this?’ I say, ‘What’s wrong with that?’ and you find out a lot of things.”
Trump, however, said he believes that the retweets are what get him into the most trouble – tweets he often sends without fully researching the original individual.
“You’ve been caught retweeting people, being like, ‘Oh, you just retweeted this crazy person,’ so you don’t even look. You just press retweet and you just fire from the hip,” Portnoy said.
“You see something that looks good and you don’t investigate it and you don’t know what’s on the helmet exactly, right, which is a miniature and you don’t blow it up, it sometimes — I have found that almost always it’s the retweets that get you in trouble,” Trump responded.
“I’ve seen that a little bit with you,” Portnoy added.
(PART 2) – @realDonaldTrump @WhiteHouse pic.twitter.com/O8G9JPwGR3
— Dave Portnoy (@stoolpresidente) July 24, 2020
Social media, Twitter especially, have taken it upon themselves to censor President Trump in recent months. This past May, for instance, Twitter applied a public notice to one of Trump’s tweets when he said, “These THUGS are dishonoring the memory of George Floyd, and I won’t let that happen. Just spoke to Governor Tim Walz and told him that the Military is with him all the way. Any difficulty and we will assume control but, when the looting starts, the shooting starts. Thank you!”
Twitter claimed that the president was promoting violence.
In May, President Trump signed an executive order aiming to change a federal law that shields social media companies from being sued for content published on their platforms, arguing that those companies have a bias against conservatives.
“The order also seeks to channel complaints about political bias to the Federal Trade Commission, an agency that the White House has asked to probe whether tech companies’ content-moderation policies are in keeping with their pledges of neutrality,” The Washington Post reported. “The order additionally created a council in cooperation with state attorneys general to probe allegations of censorship based on political views. And it tasked federal agencies with reviewing their spending on social media advertising.”