Does President Trump Actually Write His Own Tweets?

President Donald Trump has spent years posting the most unhinged content to social media, from all-caps screeds in the immediate wake of his 2020 presidential election defeat to AI videos promoting fictional magic beds. But we’re often asking ourselves: Did Trump actually sit down and post that himself?

Wired has a new report that takes a look at the mechanics of Trump’s social media posting habits. The sources are all people from within Trump’s orbit, which means we need to take everything they say with a grain of salt. These people lie constantly.

But Wired’s reporting does provide some insight into what’s going on behind the scenes. And it can help us connect some dots and better understand what’s actually happening when Trump’s account posts such bizarre nonsense.

Trump types about 5% of his posts

The short answer is that Trump isn’t actually typing out the posts that everyone is seeing day to day about 95% of the time. At least that’s according to Laura Loomer, the far-right conspiracy theorist who holds enormous sway within the administration when it comes to people getting fired for “disloyalty.”

Loomer has no official role within the White House, but she’s terminally online and has taken credit for several people getting fired because she believed they were loyal to President Joe Biden or Democrats more broadly. We’re not talking low-level people getting the boot either. Loomer was credited with the ouster of Gen. Timothy Haugh, the head of the NSA and U.S. Cyber Command, back in April, along with the deputy head of the NSA.

Loomer isn’t the only source who believes that Trump isn’t actually typing out posts 95% of the time. Wired says that this number is consistent with unnamed sources who guesstimate the same thing. But it’s important to note that just because Trump isn’t actually typing, that doesn’t mean his aides are creating his content without any input from the man himself.

Who’s at the keyboard?

There are two people who are usually posting content to Trump’s account on Truth Social, the platform he owns and posts to almost exclusively under his name. The first person is Natalie Harp, a 34-year-old aide who actually does the typing when the president wants to share something with the world on social media.

Harp has been called the “human printer” because she’s long printed articles for Trump to read. Trump prefers to read things on paper, perhaps because he has poor vision, and it can be hard to read things on the relatively small screen of a smartphone. Trump has been photographed wearing glasses, typically while reading something as he’s chauffeured around, though he never does that openly in public.

Harp worked as an anchor for One America News Network in the early 2020s and is one of the people actually banging things out on a keyboard these days. We even have visual evidence of Harp at work from the 2024 presidential campaign. She appeared in the political documentary Art of the Surge, where viewers saw a room of people around Trump watching Democratic challenger Kamala Harris on TV at the Democratic National Convention.

The video shows Trump dictating posts to Harp, who’s dutifully typing them out in the room. The pro-Trump documentary gives the impression that there’s a large team of people working on messaging, which is likely true even post-campaign, but there’s no mistaking who’s in charge. Trump’s message of petty, grievance-filled fascism drips from every post, even if he’s not the one physically sitting at the computer.

The other person who actually types out Trump’s posts is Dan Scavino, who used to work as an assistant manager at the Trump National Golf Club Westchester in New York, according to Wired. Scavino has been around, leading Trump’s social media efforts since his first term in office from 2017-2021, but Wired notes that Scavino has been delegating a lot of that work, suggesting Harp may be the one mostly commonly typing.

When Trump does post, how does he do it?

According to Wired, Trump’s share of actually posting was “significantly higher” than 5% during the “peak Twitter era,” though it’s unclear what that means exactly. Was the peak Twitter era in the early 2010s, before he ran for president, or in the late 2010s when he was actively sitting in the Oval Office? That part is never answered.

The new report from Wired claims that Trump will sometimes post his own videos, something that Gizmodo is extremely skeptical of. We don’t doubt that Trump will see videos that he likes and get his aides to post them. But the Truth Social app doesn’t have a button that allows you to easily download videos to your camera roll. This seems like one of those claims that someone like Loomer or another Trump fan would say in an effort to make the 79-year-old sound less ignorant of tech.

In the lead-up to the 2016 presidential election, Gizmodo examined whether Trump had actually used a desktop or laptop computer in his life. We found no evidence that he had in 2016, and have found no evidence he’s done so in the decade since. At the time, Trump talked about how he tweets for himself after 7 p.m. but “young ladies” tweeted for him during the day.

And it’s still unclear what percentage of the videos Trump actually sees before they’re posted when they’re clearly sourced from other social media platforms. Did Trump watch the AI video depicting himself dumping diarrhea on No Kings protesters? Did the president see the AI video of himself promoting a magical “med bed” before it was sent out? Or did Dan Scavino like those and share them without permission?

We still don’t know the answer to that, along with what percentage of text-based posts may go out under his name without a thorough review. And we may never get a proper answer to that question since it can only be answered by the inner circle of MAGA faithful that Trump has surrounded himself with. Again, these folks aren’t known for being truthful about anything.

The posts are getting sloppier

President Trump’s posts to Truth Social have gotten noticeably sloppier recently. The account frequently posts typos and spelling errors, which are then deleted and reposted. Back in August, the account had to delete and repost something about Sydney Sweeney three times.

In one of the most well-remembered slip-ups, Trump posted “Despite the constant negative press covfefe,” in 2017, leading people to wonder what he meant. Incredibly, Trump’s press secretary at the time didn’t just say it was a typo and a prematurely sent tweet. She insisted that everyone knew what he meant.

Even just in the past week, we’ve seen Trump’s account post two thoughts prematurely. On Oct. 24, the account wrote, “Just in: Documents show conclusively that Christopher Wray, Merrill Garland, Lisa,” and nothing else, cutting off mid-sentence. That post was deleted and reposted more fully, calling for the prosecution of perceived political enemies.

And on Wednesday, Trump’s account wrote, “South Carerddd.” It’s not clear what was trying to be said, but the president is currently in South Korea. The post was deleted, but there wasn’t an immediate follow-up that gave any indication of what may have been attempted.

The entire government is getting more extreme

Trump’s account posts primarily to Truth Social, but there are plenty of other accounts associated with the Trump regime that are posting across a wide swath of social media, like X, Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok. And just about every federal agency has adopted the meme language of the far-right while posting some truly disturbing stuff.

Border Patrol posted a video to Facebook and Instagram featuring antisemitic slurs over the summer, only deleting it after Nazis noticed and started celebrating a couple of weeks ago. And last week, the Department of Homeland Security posted a video of anti-ICE protests in Portland, Oregon, that included a song popular with Nazis. DHS denied posting a Nazi dog whistle, but the far-right has always operated in the margins of plausible deniability.

Not all of the content is politically extreme. Some of it’s just weird, like the TikTok video posted by the White House on Tuesday that depicted an overweight JD Vance meme singing the song from Halo in a shower.

When it’s not plain weird, the content is often just misleading. The Washington Post has a new report out on Wednesday about the footage that DHS is using for many of its hype videos online. The clips sometimes have nothing to do with the immigration enforcement operations they claim to depict and are often many months old. A White House spokesperson responded to the Post by saying that they’d keep posting “banger memes on social media.”

Gizmodo has received very similar responses from the government when we’ve asked about the extremist content being posted on official accounts. And the Trump regime is obviously going to keep doing it. They believe, perhaps accurately, that part of the battle for hearts and minds is being waged online. The question is whether this content resonates with the average American or just far-right weirdos.

For example, photos of Border Patrol chief Greg Bovino looking like a Nazi recently went viral. About two hours after Gizmodo asked DHS about the photos, the agency posted a video of Bovino leaving a Chicago courthouse on Tuesday.

We REFUSE to back down from our mission to make America safe.@CMDROpAtLargeCA is putting his life on the line to protect our citizens, and no amount of radical terror or anarchy will stop us in our mission. pic.twitter.com/O6YcvWLmKe

— Homeland Security (@DHSgov) October 28, 2025

People online obviously have a lot of opinions about the hand gestures Bovino was making in the video. But all of this content is playing with plausible deniability. Did we really see what we just saw there? It’s a question we’re going to be asking ourselves frequently for the foreseeable future.