On Sunday afternoon, @realDonaldTrump, the official Twitter handle of the Republican presidential front-runner, manually retweeted a deeply racist and inaccurate chart purporting to show racial crime statistics in America. As everyone in the world knows by now, the chart—created by Nazis!—is bullshit. Here’s something that is fascinating about the whole episode: Donald Trump almost certainly did not send the tweet.
As I explained in September, only a vanishingly small number of @realDonaldTrump’s tweets actually come from Trump himself. He dictates many of his tweets to aides. He sends some—a very small few—himself using an iPhone. And many manual retweets are sent by one of his staffers. Retweets presumably aren’t the sort of thing he would be dictating. He’s probably not on his phone listening to someone read his mentions and saying, “Retweet that one!” Sunday’s tweet was sent from an Android. Trump tweets—when he rarely does—from an iPhone. It’s very likely Trump did not send that retweet. Someone who works for him did. This isn’t the fascinating thing.
The fascinating thing is that instead of a blaming the tweet on a subordinate—something they haven’t been shy about doing in the past—the campaign has chosen to stay silent about it. They have apparently made the political calculation that it would be worse for Trump to acknowledge not sending the racist tweet than to endure a few days of stories about how racist he is.
It’s 2015, and if you’re running for the Republican nomination for president, saying racist things doesn’t hurt your poll numbers.
An email to the Trump campaign seeking clarification on the authorship of the tweet was not immediately returned.
