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Donald Trump: 'I don't like tweeting'

Commentary: Say what now? And you thought the president-elect was running for tweeter-in-chief.

Chris Matyszczyk
2 min read

Technically Incorrect offers a slightly twisted take on the tech that's taken over our lives.


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It's the media's fault.

Pool, Getty Images

Donald Trump's Twitter posts are very often full of fire, gusto and sheer joie-de-tweet.

I imagine he gets up in the morning, reads the papers, watches the shows and decides whose nerves he's going to grate today.

You might call it making America grate again.

It's impossible, therefore, to imagine that this isn't fun for him. Yet on Wednesday, two days before Inauguration Day, that's what he claimed to Fox News.

"I don't like tweeting," he said. "I have other things I could be doing."

Yes, but those things involve such odious, tedious tasks as sitting in meetings and listening to policy wonks. It's surely far more entertaining to go bing, bing, bing and shatter an individual's or a company's day and ego.

Trump, though, has an explanation for why he tweets despite loathing it. "I get very dishonest media. I get very dishonest press," he said. "And it's my only way that I can counteract."

Some might wonder whether he's really counteracting the (allegedly) dishonest press.

It could be that he's knowingly giving the press fodder for the day, thereby preventing the press from eking out its own angle on other aspects of his personality, his policies or his investments in other parts of the world.

The Trump transition team didn't immediately respond to a request for comment.

A Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll released Wednesday suggested that 69 percent of Americans would prefer it if Trump cut out the tweeting. Even 47 percent of Republicans declared that his tweeting is counterproductive.

I wonder, though, if the press did start writing about Trump in a way he considers honest, would he refrain from tweeting?

Or would he still find targets somewhere out there, deserving of his need to set them straight?