Spicer sees ‘deep strategy’ to Trump’s tweets

There’s a “deep strategy” behind most of President-elect Donald Trump’s tweets, according to his incoming White House press secretary.

Speaking on a podcast with a former top aide to President Obama, Sean Spicer argued it was unfair to characterize Trump’s tweeting as “rogue.”

“We’ve sat down and he’ll walk through and say, ‘This is where I want to end up.’ … People assume because he didn’t broadcast it out, and because he didn’t have a press conference or a meeting with people to say, ‘This is what I’m doing,’ that it’s rogue,” Spicer said on David Axelrod’s “The Axe Files.”

“There’s a lot of times where there’s a method or a decision made behind something … In most cases there’s a deep strategy to this, to where he wants to end up. And sometimes he’s sought a ton of input, and sometimes he sought the input that he found necessary.”

{mosads}Spicer described Trump’s tweets, the president-elect’s primary mode of communication, as the results of strategic thinking in which he works backward from his goal.

Trump has long been a prolific Twitter user — he’s tweeted 34,200 times since his first in May of 2009 and is nearing 19 million followers.

But his liberal use of Twitter has landed him in hot water — his 3 a.m. tweets criticizing a former pageant contestant who was campaigning for Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton met with significant criticism, as did his once-frequent retweets of controversial people and messages during his campaign.

The most recent uproar was over Trump’s tweet on Wednesday morning when he highlighted WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange’s assertion that Russia was not behind the recent hacks on the Democratic National Committee and Hillary Clinton’s campaign chairman, John Podesta.

Julian Assange said “a 14 year old could have hacked Podesta” – why was DNC so careless? Also said Russians did not give him the info!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) January 4, 2017

Spicer would not tell Axelrod whether there had been any discussions with Trump’s staff about that specific tweet, but added that the president-elect makes the final decision about what he tweets.