On Tuesday morning, President Donald Trump yawned, stretched his Twitter fingers, and released three tweets: two about the stock market and one about the number of his social media followers.
At least the stock and jobs tweets were concerning the American economy (even though some attribute that growth to work done by President Obama) and that's a subject with which a POTUS should concern himself.
The latter, about his number of followers, is pretty obviously a distraction. And, of course, a bit of a lie.
The Washington Post calculated Trump's number of followers across social media:
Add up that generous list—which includes accounts like the White House on Instagram, which no one has ever, ever suggested Trump stop using—and the number comes to about 93.1 million.
The Post also suggests that Trump could be counting the Reddit communities dedicated to him, which is a huge stretch, and still doesn't bring Trump up to 110 million.
Unless Trump has 20 million Snapchat followers (info that's not public), Trump's estimate seems to be rounding up pretty generously. Then there's the bots. Oh, the bots.
Via the Washington Post:
But even if we manage to cobble together some number that gets close to 110 million, there are two very good reasons that Trump's not followed by 110 million people. First, a lot of those people follow multiple accounts across those networks and, second, some followers are robots.
...
That said, there are certainly thousands or millions of followers of the @realdonaldtrump account who are actually automated accounts. There are also any number of followers that are tied to businesses or tied back to the same individual.
Meanwhile, this is all a big distraction from a lawsuit that alleges that "the Fox News Channel and a wealthy supporter of President Trump" worked with the White House to come up with a conspiracy theory about DNC aide Seth Rich. Then there's the news that Russia expelled U.S. diplomats, the latest meltdown over White House staff, and, of course, enough collusion for everybody.
And if the number of tweets isn't enough of a lie for you, the idea that Trump's "enemies" want him to stop his most self-destructive habit certainly is.
Not to mention, this morning's tweet is almost a word-for-word rehash of an old one from June.
Is the Commander in Tweets running out of inspiration? Apparently the bots don't value originality.