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Something Weird Is Happening With President Trump’s Twitter

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President Trump loves Twitter. It’s a direct stream-of-consciousness rant about whatever pops into his mind (or onto cable TV) at any given second. But here at Gizmodo we can’t help but notice that something is a little different this week. The president’s Twitter feed has become, dare we say, restrained?

Yes, “restrained” is all relative, and there’s always the danger of saying that Donald Trump is “pivoting” at the precise moment that he shows us he’s the same man he always was. But there’s a noticeable change in his tweets from the past few days. Just take a look at his tweets from this morning:

Notice anything strange? Yes, Trump is still tweeting out things in a bombastic manner that would be considered ridiculous by normal presidential standards. But if you look at his most recent tweets, there is a lot less attacking of his “enemies” and a lot more emphasis on what he sees as positive developments. And it’s been happening all week.

Lately, President Trump has been tweeting about job growth and the stock market, even if he’s taking credit for things that he may regret later. (Stock markets have a way of correcting themselves, and you know he won’t want to take credit for the inevitable downturn.) But there’s still much more positivity than there is negativity:

Granted, there have been a few “attacks,” even against his own party, but they’ve been in the minority this week.

Compare that with President Trump’s Twitter rants from as recent as July 29th and 30th (Saturday and Sunday) where he went on unhinged, and far more typical, diatribes about witch hunts, fake news, “foolish past leaders,” and sprinkled his words liberally with exclamation points.

On Saturday alone he sent thirteen tweets in his more usual style:

Or just take a look at the week before when he was railing against his own Attorney General Jeff Sessions.

One theory for this shift would be the appointment of John Kelly as his Chief of Staff. Kelly is reportedly watching Trump like a hawk:

It’s unlikely that Kelly is there for Trump’s early morning tweets, but perhaps someone explained to Trump that it makes a lot more sense to emphasize what you view as the positive things happening in the country rather than the negative. It’s Media Relations 101 and he is, after all, the most powerful man in the US right now.

Like I said, it’s entirely possible that we’re calling this one way too early. And obviously Trump’s core values (those of bigotry and racism) haven’t changed. But he might be wising up from a purely aesthetic point of view, at least on Twitter. And for those who oppose the president’s discriminatory agenda, that’s actually somewhat terrifying.

If the president starts to hide his terrible agenda behind a veneer of pearly white smiles (take a look at that photo above) then he might actually get some things done with Congress. As a reminder, those things include massive tax cuts for the rich, deporting non-criminal undocumented immigrants, and stripping health care from millions of Americans. Chilling, to say the least.

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