Hillary Clinton says Donald Trump has a good reason to tweet: To distract people from more serious issues dogging his young presidency.
Hillary Clinton says Donald Trump’s tweets are distracting America from important issues
“I mean, you can’t let Trump and his allies be a diversion.”
Asa Mathat
“I mean, you can’t let Trump and his allies be a diversion. They are a threat. And they have been effective up until now,” Clinton said this week at Recode’s annual Code Conference. “So Twitter is a perfect example. You’re going to drive up the numbers. You’ve got more people chasing rabbits down rabbit holes, you’ve got all kinds of stuff happening. Why? To divert attention.”
Trump is the most flamboyant Twitter user we’ve ever seen from Washington, D.C. He tweets often, sometimes as many as 10 times per day, and his tweets garner extreme levels of media attention and can dominate news cycles or send reporters scrambling to confirm things that may not have happened, like when Trump tweeted that President Barack Obama had tapped his phones.
Clinton was particularly peeved about the world latching onto what appeared to be a typo made by Trump earlier this week when he tweeted out the word “covfefe.” Nobody knows what that is, and the internet had a field day.
That, though, is part of the problem, Clinton says.
“It’s like ‘covfefe,’ trending, world wide,” she added. “Maybe for a minute you’ll forget the latest accusations about them conspiring with Russia, or their trillion dollar mathematical mistake in their budget, or depriving 23 million people of health care.”
(Somewhat ironically, Clinton got into a little Twitter beef with Trump shortly after she made these comments, and “covfefe” was at the center of the feud.)
Not everyone agrees with Clinton’s feelings. Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey, for example, thinks it’s important that Trump continue to use Twitter.
“I believe it’s really important to have these conversations out in the open, rather than have them behind closed doors,” he said last month.
You can watch the entire Clinton interview from Code right here.
This article originally appeared on Recode.net.
