A lot of attention is paid to the things Donald Trump tweets, and for good reason; he’s the president of the United States and has a penchant for being a loose cannon. But something that’s easily overlooked are the tweets posted by other accounts that Trump “likes.” Trump “likes” things on Twitter much less often than he actually tweets — he’s only liked 46 tweets in his entire time on the social media platform, as opposed to him tweeting over 34,000 times — and the last time he liked a tweet was on New Year’s Eve, a tweet by his daughter Ivanka expressing how great 2016 was for her and wishing all her followers a happy new year. At one point, Trump went from September of 2013 until April of 2016 without “liking” a single tweet.
Browsing through Trump’s history of “liked” tweets, many of the 46 are tweets posted by his children, Ivanka, Donald Jr., and Eric (sorry Tiffany, no “likes” for you), some are links to news stories about him that he probably found flattering, some are random @ replies from followers, and some of the tweets Trump has “liked” are tweets he posted, because of course Donald Trump “likes” his own tweets. The first tweet Trump ever “liked” was a May 2010 tweet by Morning Joe‘s Mika Brzezinski, who is now completely freaked out by Trump, about his line of ties.
With all of this established, Trump “liked” a tweet today, a peculiar occurrence on its own, made even more peculiar by the subject matter of the tweet he “liked”: a Fox Nation tweet linking to a post about Democratic Senator Al Franken stating that he thinks Trump’s attorney general, Jeff Sessions, likely perjured himself during his confirmation hearing a few weeks ago. See for yourself:
Now, there could be an innocent explanation for this. Trump could have just used the “like” function in this instance as a way to bookmark the Fox story to look at later. One of his surrogates with access to his Twitter account could have been the person who “liked” it (looking at you, Kellyanne). Trump also could have accidentally “liked” the tweet (it happens). But it’s much more fun to imagine that Trump is at war with everyone in his administration and that maybe he derived some delight from seeing that Sessions is being accused of a serious crime by a member of the U.S. Senate. It’s not entirely far-fetched, either, as Trump reportedly went “ballistic” after Sessions recused himself last week from any potential Justice Department investigation into Russia.
Then again, Trump may have “liked” the tweet because he for real likes that Jeff Sessions possibly committed perjury for him like a good, loyal soldier. Yeah, come to think of it, that’s probably it.
(H/T: Ashley Feinberg)