President Donald Trump has said that, yes, he sometimes opens his phone and tweets while in bed.
“Well, perhaps sometimes in bed, perhaps sometimes at breakfast or lunch or whatever, but generally speaking during the early morning, or during the evening I can do whatever,” Trump said during an interview with Piers Morgan on ITV, the British television channel, before continuing: “But I am very busy during the day, very long hours. I am busy.”
The president made the revelation in a sweeping discussion with Morgan that aired on Sunday. Regarding social media, Trump did note that he “will sometimes just dictate out something really quickly and give it to one of my people to put it on” social media but said he often writes the messages himself.
He also said he viewed Twitter as a means to “defend himself.”
“I get a lot of fake news, a lot of news that is very false or made up,” Trump told Morgan.
The New York Times’ Maggie Haberman noted that when the outlet first reported that Trump often took to the Twitterverse “propped on his pillow” late last year, the president was furious, “almost as angry as the fact-check about his 4-8 hours of TV a day,” she said.
Trump has routinely defended his use of Twitter as a means to reach his supporters directly, saying the venue is “unfiltered” by the media.
Twitter has long faced a backlash from users who have accused the president of using the outlet to undermine national security, including a moment earlier this year when Trump boasted that he had a “nuclear button” that was “bigger” and “more powerful” than North Korean leader Kim Jong Un. The company said it wouldn’t block world leaders like Trump, saying such individuals “play a critical role” in the global conversation “because of their outsized impacts on our society.”