Trump Takes on His Haters, Tony Schwartz

Jonathan Chantz

jc209914@ohio.edu

Social media has changed the environment for the last presidential elections in the last 8 years. Most viable candidates have a team of educated communication majors who went to school to learn the best ways to captivate and persuade audiences, and rarely does the actual candidate tweet or post by themselves.

This of course excludes Donald Trump, @realDonaldTrump, who personally controls his own account and posts any all all thoughts that might go through his head. This last week consisted of Trump tweeting at Tony Schwartz, the ghostwriter of “Trump: The Art of the Deal,” and trying to defend himself for the comments he made on a CNN panel review of Trumps character.

During the talk show Schwartz discussed when he was working with Trump for 18 months he would frequently talk about his admiration for Vladimir Putin, calling him, “a real killer.” Schwartz also said that he had the attention span similar to his three year old daughter and was unable to do interviews longer than 10 to 15 minutes.

The show aired on September 9 in the evening, and it must have shaken up Trump enough to get him tweeting at 2:47 in the morning when he posted, “Dummy writer @tonyschwartz, who wanted to do a second book with me for years (I said no), is now a hostile basket case who feels jitted!” His next tweet came ten minutes later when he posted, “I havn’t seen @tonyschwartz in many years, he hardly knows me. Never liked his style. Super lib, Crooked H supporter. Irrelevant dope!” Trump must be losing sleep over Schwartz’s comments.

Tony Schwartz responded to Trump’s ‘acclaims’ later that day and corrected him tweeting, “Will correct every lie you say @realDonaldTrump. I never approached you to do a 2nd book. You came to me & I said no. You felt jilted, not me”. At this point it is a he-said-she-said, but when you are the republican nomination for the President of the United States one would think you have greater things to deal with than one person disagreeing with your overall character. But let’s not forget this is the Real Donald Trump we are dealing with.

On September 11, 2013, Donald Trump tweeted, I would like to extend my best wishes to all, even the haters and losers, on this special date, September 11th. Now that in itself is worrisome for the possible president to tweet, but what makes it worse is how he posted the same status again this last week in lieu of Tony Schwartz's comments. He did delete the tweet shortly after but this brings up questions like, “maybe Trump should hire some professionals for his media accounts,” or, “maybe this man shouldn't be running for President of the United States.”

Some people like Trump because he speaks his mind whenever possible and this is definitely true in his Twitter account. It is alarming to see how much of an influence Trump has with his 11.5 million followers, the 150th most popular Twitter account.