Meet Trump’s tweeter in chief:
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/16/magazine/dan-scavino-the-secretary-of-offense.html
By Robert Draper
April 16, 2018
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Scavino was another of the “originals” on Trump’s 2016 campaign...I could never quite ascertain what he was doing to further his boss’s presidential ambitions. Aggressively nondescript, Scavino could often be seen in a suit at the side of the stage, taking photos of the immense rally crowds with his iPhone and later, while scowling at his laptop aboard Trump’s 757, posting the images to Facebook... after Inauguration Day, even as he got an official title: assistant to the president and director of social media, a position that had never existed before and one that paid him the maximum White House staff salary of $179,700...The only official function Scavino filled that might justify his salary and his prime White House real estate was detailed in the lawsuit’s stipulation of facts. “Scavino,” both parties to the lawsuit agreed, “assists President Trump in operating the @realDonaldTrump account, including by drafting and posting tweets to the account.” No one else, besides Trump himself, had access to the most consequential and controversial social media account in the world.
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Scavino was “the conductor of the Trump Train.” For those who have forgotten the history of that particular phrase, the “Trump Train” began early in the campaign as a quixotic rallying cry...The two first met in 1990, when Scavino was a teenage caddy at a Westchester County course that Trump would eventually purchase and rename the Trump National Golf Club. Scavino carried Trump’s clubs, earning a $200 tip from the developer — who later in the club’s Grille Room told the caddy, “You are going to work for me one day.” Scavino went on to major in communications at the State University of New York in Plattsburgh; he did a six-month internship at Walt Disney World, then later got a job with the Texas-based Galderma Laboratories as a pharmaceutical rep; he married and settled down. But throughout it all, he held onto the two hundred-dollar bills that Trump had given him. When that same Westchester golf club, which now bore the billionaire’s name, offered Scavino a job as an assistant manager in 2004, he accepted. Four years later, he was the club’s general manager, whizzing around America in the big man’s private plane. After a brief and not altogether successful stint running his own consulting firm, Scavino reached out to Trump’s son Eric in November 2014 to see if he could come back into the fold. On Nov. 8, having heard the rumors of a possible presidential bid, Scavino buttonholed his old boss at Eric’s wedding and said, “When you run, I’m in.” What Scavino was offering were the services of a registered independent who had no experience in politics. He had only one qualification: He was a Trump die-hard.
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In this new role, as with so many of his roles for Trump over the years, Scavino continued to serve as a kind of caddy. He went on food runs for the candidate to McDonald’s and KFC. He faithfully typed out Trump’s tweets as the candidate dictated them. He also wandered the events, climbed the rafters and snapped smartphone pictures, which he then posted on both his and the campaign’s various social-media accounts. It happened that the campaign already had a professional photographer on the payroll. But this was becoming a liability, in that she tended to take hundreds of images at each event, and the candidate would insist on spending hours of valuable time poring over every last one of them. The campaign did nominally have a social media specialist — Justin McConney, son of the Trump Organization’s controller — but he lacked Scavino’s instinct for the base, and in any event, McConney was stationed back at Trump Tower, away from the real action on the campaign trail. By early 2016, Scavino had become in essence both the Trump campaign’s traveling photographer and its social media chieftain. And because the self-funding candidate had no intention of spending a dime on media coverage, Scavino with his Facebook videography also became the closest thing the Trump campaign had to an in-house ad maker.
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More than anyone else in the White House, the director of social media spends his day online, monitoring the #MAGA congregation. “Dan talks to the base more than anybody else after the president,” one senior White House official told me. “He’s the conductor of the Trump Train, and these people know he’s true blue, and he also knows all the influencers.” ... Since arriving in the nation’s capital, Scavino has kept attacking President Trump’s opponents from his own Twitter account: Nancy Pelosi, Bill Kristol, Kathy Griffin...The full extent of Scavino’s role in Trump’s Twitter regimen has never been fully disclosed. White House officials initially maintained to me that he only typed and posted verbatim what Trump dictated to him, while occasionally contributing anodyne tweets relating to the president’s schedule. (“News conference at the White House concerning the Omnibus Spending Bill. 1:00 P.M.”) Somewhat begrudgingly, one senior official did not deny that Scavino also sometimes corrected Trump’s spelling errors. But the Knight Institute lawsuit had named Scavino, Hicks and Sanders because, as communications staff members, they are likely to “suggest content” for Trump’s tweets, just as Trump’s subordinates did during the campaign. In particular, said one individual who witnessed this interactivity on the campaign trail and another who saw it in the White House, Scavino frequently supplied the litany of details in Trump’s tweets about, say, claims of Crooked Hillary’s various malfeasances or of the F.B.I.’s corrupt activity. “Fifty percent of the time, Trump is ripping these out himself, and 50 percent is going to Scavino,” one of them told me. Evidence of Scavino’s active participation in Trump’s tweets emerged last autumn. On the morning of Oct. 4, Scavino posted to his own account one of the social media director’s usual rants against the media: “NBC news is #FakeNews and more dishonest than even CNN. They are a disgrace to good reporting. No wonder their news ratings are way down!” One minute later, the identical message was posted on his boss’s account as an original Trump tweet. Scavino hastily deleted his first tweet, but not before eagle-eyed users took screen shots.
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...I had heard rumors of the split from a former White House staff member who, while praising Scavino’s crazed work ethic and fealty to Trump, casually added, “By the way, it also destroyed his marriage.” Scavino had long struggled to balance his ambitions with caring for his wife, who suffers from chronic Lyme disease...The personal toll of being Trump’s social media director may not end at Scavino’s marriage. Last December, The Washington Post reported that an executive with Vkontakte, Russia’s version of Facebook, had twice emailed Scavino and Donald Trump Jr. during the presidential campaign, offering to promote Trump’s candidacy on the platform. According to an email read to The Post, Scavino’s response to the American intermediary, Rob Goldstone, was effusive: “Please feel free to send me whatever you have. Thank you so much for looking out for Mr. Trump and his presidential campaign.”
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