President Donald Trump’s prolific tweeting stems from a fundamental need, according to White House counselor Kellyanne Conway.
“He needs to tweet like we need to eat,” she told The New York Times in a recent interview, adding that Twitter is perhaps the president’s most powerful weapon in getting his message out to the world.
“It’s the democratization of information,” she said.
Regardless of who Trump’s Twitter followers are, “they all hear ‘ping’ at the same time,” Conway said.
Conway’s husband, George Conway, is also an avid Twitter user. A vocal critic of the president’s, he often uses the platform to skewer his wife’s boss.
The Times published Conway’s comments on Saturday as part of a comprehensive interactive feature about Trump’s presidential Twitter habits.
According to the Times, Trump has tweeted more than 11,300 times since taking office. More than half of those tweets were attacks on someone or something, the paper said, including about 1,300 tweets that attacked news organizations and about 850 that targeted minority groups.
Trump has also tweeted praise at times ― mostly for himself.
The Times said 2,026 of his tweets “praised President Trump.”
Read the full New York Times feature.