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The Twitter Bot That's Kellyanne Conway's Worst Nightmare

By Kristy Puchko | Politics | June 6, 2017 |

By Kristy Puchko | Politics | June 6, 2017 |


Yesterday, White House counselor Kellyanne Conway showed her ass on national television when she tried to assert the media shouldn’t be paying so much attention to President* Donald Trump’s tweets.

“This obsession with covering everything he says on Twitter and very little what he does as president—” she chirped on Today. But her bullshit was cut off by MSNBC anchor Craig Melvin, who retorted, “But that’s his preferred method of communication with the American people.”

Conway, lying so flat-out her Ann Taylor dress slacks should have burst into flames insisted, “That’s not true.” To which Melvin, mic dropped by noting with an edge in his voice, “Well, he hasn’t given an interview in three weeks.”

The press is over Conway’s smiling brand of lies, and Melvin diplomatically told her that a man who’s put the whole world at risk by refusing to sign the Paris Accord is not getting a pass from the media while he avoids them and goes on one insane Twitter storm after another.

It was brief and amazing, and you can watch it here.

Conway wants you to ignore Trump’s Twitter because the White House disinformation spin team apparently has no control over it. So again and again, Trump’s early morning tweets send them into panic mode. But when the President of the United States is avoiding making official statements in the hope of ducking mainstream media criticism, you have to look to his Twitter. Or look to this @RealPressSecBot, which turns every Trump tweet into an official-looking White House press release.

In this context, Trump’s tweets seem even more mind-meltingly crass and reckless. And people are taking notice. The newly minted Twitter bot already has over 80 thousand followers. And you might remember its creator Russel Neiss as the web-savvy activist behind the pro-refugee account @Stl_Manifest. In an interview with the Washington Post, the St. Louis-based software engineer (who is a personal friend, full disclosh), said the bot is just “taking the president’s words and giving them the honor that they deserve…If there’s any ridiculousness in it, it comes from the words themselves.”

Basically, many Americans think of Twitter as a frivolity, a place for silly arguments, memes, and ego stroking. And it is all that, but it’s also the place where the American president is mouthing off at all hours, retweeting unverified news, lashing out about current events, and blithely mocking other nations and their leaders. Of course his tweets matter. Neiss’s bot slyly shoves that sickening reality under our noses every time @realDonaldTrump hits the tweet button.

The header image is from Saturday Night Live, because we prefer Kate McKinnon to Kellyanne Conway at all times.