If you made the assumption that a PR team is handling Donald Trump’s Twitter assaults, you’d be wrong. The incoming press secretary Sean Spicer said that the President-elect’s tweets are his own, and the team never knows when or what he’ll tweet next. He also said that it’s likely that President Trump will continue to tweet while in office, as this offers him a direct way to address the public.
“I do not know, I do not get a memo [about the tweets],” Spicer said at a University of Chicago Institute of Politics event. “He drives the train on this.”
Former Obama press secretary Robert Gibbs and former Obama adviser David Axelrod were also attending the event, The Wall Street Journal reports.
Trump’s tweeting will make Spicer’s job more exciting, he said.
“You know that he can drive a message and influence people in a way that hasn’t been done before,” the future press secretary said.
Spicer also dismissed the idea that Trump tweets randomly, labeling such thinking as misconception. “He is a very strategic thinker,” Spicer said. “He thinks about where things are going to end up.”
Spicer also said that Trump’s doesn’t have to fact check what he says, and there’s a distinction between Trump’s “right to express his opinion,” and journalists’ duty to the truth.
“It’s one thing to make a statement, but if you’re a journalist, your job is to get that right,” he said, according to The Chicago Tribune.
Trump was often criticized for his relationship with the truth in the messages he distributes, via Twitter or otherwise. From the looks of it. Trump will continue to tweet when and what he wants, regardless of whether it’s true, or whether it has any effects on the country.