We have many people to blame for our current predicament, but today, I learned of a new person who deserves a small portion of our ire: Trump’s first social media manager, Justin McConney, who taught him, much to our everlasting regret, to tweet.
McConney was the Trump Organization’s social media director from 2011 t0 2017, and according to a new report in Politico, played a key role in convincing the Trump family to begin to use social media.
We learn that Trump used to write out his tweets in Sharpie:
Even as the mogul embraced digital media, he did so in the most analog way possible. He had McConney print out his Twitter mentions, and he would use Sharpie pens to scribble responses, which McConney would then type up and tweet out. After appearing at events, Trump, who remained distrustful of anything he saw only on a screen, had McConney print out 8×10 glossy photos of him for his sign-off before they were posted online.
“He was very old school back then,” McConney said. “He was not someone who really used computers or went on the internet very much.”
At one point, Trump began tweeting on his own, a moment that McConney likened to “the moment in ‘Jurassic Park’ when Dr. Grant realized that velociraptors could open doors,” he told Politico. “I was like, ‘Oh no.’”
Accurate, if insulting to velociraptors who if I remember correctly are highly intelligent, sensitive creatures.