At New Hampshire rally, President Obama pounces on report that Donald Trump got his Twitter access taken away
At a rally Monday in New Hampshire, President Barack Obama asked voters in the small, sought-after battleground state to elect Hillary Clinton in order to build on Democrats’ accomplishments, and cast Donald Trump as “temperamentally unfit” for the presidency.
To illustrate his point, Obama highlighted a recent report that Trump’s campaign staff took away the Republican presidential nominee’s personal Twitter access.
“Over the weekend, his campaign took his Twitter account away from him,” Obama told the crowd at the University of New Hampshire in Durham.
“If your closest advisers don’t trust you to tweet, how can you trust him with the nuclear codes?” he asked. “You can’t do it.”
In an in-depth article on the final days of the campaign Sunday, The New York Times reported that Trump’s aides “finally wrested away the Twitter account that he used to colorfully — and often counterproductively — savage his rivals.” From the Times:
Several advisers warned him that he risked becoming like a wild animal chasing its prey so zealously that it raced over a cliff — a reminder that he could pursue his grievances and his eagerness to fling insults, but that the cost would be a plunge into an electoral abyss.
Taking away Twitter turned out to be an essential move by his press team, which deprived him of a previously unfiltered channel for his aggressions.
On Thursday, as his plane idled on the tarmac in Miami, Mr. Trump spotted Air Force One outside his window. As he glowered at the larger plane, he told Ms. Hicks, his spokeswoman, to jot down a proposed tweet about President Obama, who was campaigning nearby for Mrs. Clinton.
“Why is he campaigning instead of creating jobs and fixing Obamacare?” Mr. Trump said. “Get back to work.” After some light editing — Ms. Hicks added “for the American people” at the end — she published it.
At an earlier rally Monday in Ann Arbor, Michigan, Obama delivered the same line mocking Trump’s loss (though it did not receive as raucous an applause as it did at UNH).
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