This isn't the first time someone has pointed out that a good portion of Trump's Twitter following is fake, but what's interesting is that its fakeness seems to be increasing. In January, journalist Yashar Ali ran an audit on Trump's Twitter account and found that 68 percent of his then-20 million followers were real. Now he's at 30 million followers, but only 51 percent are real, which means of 10 million followers Trump has gained since January, about 8.3 million are fake.
In April 2016, when Trump was beginning to gain traction as a serious candidate to at least win the Republican presidential nomination, the former reality TV star had a mere 7.58 million followers, only 8 percent of which were fake, according to FiveThirtyEight. It's not surprising that as Trump's global profile has skyrocketed in the past 13 months, so too have the number of bots attached to his Twitter account—but it's astonishing how much the percentage of his followers that are fake has risen.
So is Trump actually buying new followers? We'll probably never know, but there seems to be nothing more important to Trump than how his fame relates to that of other public figures, and it can't sit well with the president that there are currently 31 accounts with more followers than his. One of those accounts is that of Barack Obama, which boasts a whopping 89 million followers, good for third-most in the world behind Katy Perry and Justin Bieber.
I for one have no trouble believing that Trump would pay for followers so that he could look popular.
But the truth is that even when he is offering money and a job he is having trouble funding people who want to be associated with him, or his presidency.
Courtesy of Buzzfeed:
BuzzFeed News spoke with 20 Republican communicators and operatives, many of whom have worked on Capitol Hill and in presidential campaigns and some who have declined previous offers to join the Trump administration. Nearly all said they would be unwilling to accept an offer to replace Dubke, who on Tuesday announced his resignation as communications director.
"Hell no!” said one Republican — one of the most common type of responses BuzzFeed News got from operatives. “That would be career suicide.”
Others brought a mix of dark humor.
"That's like asking someone who just witnessed a horrific bungee jumping accident whether they would like to go next,” one Republican source responded in a text message.
“It would be only a few months on the job before tapping out the ‘I want to spend more time with family’ email,” another said.
I really can't say that I blame any of these folks. After all who wants to board the Titanic after it is already taking on water?
Of course who needs a communications director when Trump has been handing out his cell phone number like a desperate barfly right before last call?
Courtesy of the AP:
President Donald Trump has been handing out his cellphone number to world leaders and urging them to call him directly, an unusual invitation that breaks diplomatic protocol and is raising concerns about the security and secrecy of the U.S. commander in chief’s communications.
So far only Canadian Prime Minister, and panty dampener, Justin Trudeau has actually called Trump, and that was probably just to ask him if his refrigerator was running and then to tell him he better go after it.
I keep forgetting, how long do these train wrecks typically last before the fiery explosion at the end?
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