It’s no secret that US president Donald Trump is addicted to two media sources: Fox News and Twitter. Now the Washington Post’s Philip Bump has created a Twitter account, @trumps_feed, which follows the same 45 accounts that @realDonaldTrump does, and retweets them all, essentially recreating what the president sees when he opens Twitter up.
Of those 45 accounts, 17 belong to members of the Trump family or Trump businesses. One is the White House’s official account, and eight belong to his current or previous staff. The remaining 19 belong mostly to Fox News shows and journalists and other conservative commentators.
It’s not much variety, and it shows that in the aftermath of the three press conferences in which the president addressed the Charlottesville riots—first apportioning blame “on many sides,” then belatedly condemning the white supremacists who had scheduled the rally, then reverting to suggesting moral equivalence between them and the counter-protestors—the impression he would have got from Twitter was that the country was fine with his statements, with the exception of some hateful left-wing media.
Though the feed curated by Bump doesn’t go back as far as the weekend of the protests, it does include some of the reactions Trump would have seen to his third press conference. There is not a single critical tweet among them. Here’s a selection: