Kellyanne Conway has had a wild day on Twitter. After getting into some trouble for retweeting a white nationalist Twitter account, people began speculating that Conway was on the outs with the Trump administration, using flimsy evidence that Trump had unfollowed her as proof. But as tweeters conjured up fantasies of Conway getting the boot, she was magically followed by both @realDonaldTrump and @POTUS. So what in god’s name is happening?
Early Tuesday morning, the Trump advisor responded to a tweet from @TrumpTrainNoBrk, complimenting Conway’s “strength and resiliency in face of vile hatred, bigotry, & sexism of the unhinged Left. Love you!” In response, Conway naturally told @TrumpTrainNoBrk she loved her back.
@TrumpTrainNoBrk, as it turns out, pretty blatantly runs a white nationalist Twitter account. Her bio claims she’s a commie-hating teen who loves her white identity, nationalism and Steve Bannon. (Quick nonpartisan aside, “SorosFundsTheDemonratParty dot com” is an objectively hilarious URL that unfortunately directs you to nowhere.)
After BuzzFeed News inquired about the tweet, Conway claimed she didn’t send it out herself. “I don’t know who had access to my account,” she said. “Let me see who tweeted that. That’s terrible.” She deleted the tweet, saying she “denounce[s] whoever” @TrumpTrainNoBrk is.
This, however, was only the beginning of Kellyanne’s Twitter odyssey today. Early this evening, a bunch of tweets suggesting Donald Trump unfollowed Conway from his personal and @POTUS accounts began gaining steam. “Oh. Wow. Donald has unfollowed Kellyanne Conway. There are so many plot twists. It must be near the climax,” writer Matt Haig remarked to his 122,000 followers.
https://twitter.com/embed/status/831644703875543040
While the narrative of Conway fucking up and Trump subsequently unfollowing her as a warning of an upcoming IRL unfollow works well, it’s simply not true. A Business Insider article from earlier this month giving the rundown of the elite group Trump follows shows that he was never following Conway to begin with. (It appears the @POTUS account also never followed Conway, as that account has been consistently following six people since January 23.)
Shortly after the false evidence of Conway’s departure began to gain traction—some would call this FAKE NEWS—@realDonaldTrump and @POTUS suddenly followed both her and White House Chief of Staff Reince Priebus.
The hysteria surrounding each and every move of Trump and his team on Twitter isn’t coming out of nowhere. Trump’s tweets have become increasingly influential since he assumed the presidency. National Security advisors are reportedly struggling to create policy from our leader’s online musings. Senator Chuck Grassley recently tweeted out a desperate plea to “whoever monitors Twitter at the White House” in an effort to communicate with Trump. And who could forget Bernie Sanders bringing a gigantic poster of a Trump tweet to the Senate floor in order to demonstrate the president’s flip-flop on Medicaid?
Clearly, Twitter has become an essential source of information on what the fuck is happening in our country. It’s weird, but what’s far weirder is that the only person who seems to watch the website more feverishly than scoop-hungry journalists is the President of the United States himself.
