Unraveling the mystery of Dan Scavino, the White House social media director, whose job is to help @realDonaldTrump stay unpresidential.
By Robert Draper | The New York Times Magazine
Last July, President Donald Trump was sued in federal court over his Twitter habits. It wasn’t the tone or content of Trump’s approximately 37,300 tweets that had landed him in trouble. Instead, it was the possible unconstitutionality of the way he uses one feature of the platform: the block button. The plaintiffs, represented by Columbia University’s Knight First Amendment Institute, were seven individuals — ranging from a freelance journalist to a New York comedian to a Texas police officer — who had sent negative replies to an @realDonaldTrump tweet and were subsequently blocked by the president. Though Trump’s Twitter account purports to be a personal one, the plaintiffs argued, his writings invariably involved government business and executive opinions — making his posts a public forum to which all American citizens should be guaranteed access.
Though @realDonaldTrump reads like the unabridged representation of a singular man’s impulses, three other defendants were named in the suit, which is expected to be ruled upon in the Southern District of New York in the coming months. One of them was Hope Hicks, long a public face of Trump World, the 29-year-old former model who spent the past three years as Trump’s media liaison before leaving the White House in late March. A second was Trump’s press secretary, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, the president’s designated mouthpiece. But the third, unlike Hicks and Sanders, was someone most Americans have never heard of: a man named Dan Scavino Jr.
