Aides give up on trying to control President Trump’s tweets

President Donald Trump’s post on Sen Al Franken (D-MN) allegations was the latest example of the president's habit of using his Twitter account to draw fire, rather than deflecting it. Controlling potentially damaging tweets was a job left mostly to the legal team in the early days of the administration. Marc Kasowitz, a former Trump attorney, and Jay Sekulow, a current member of the president's legal team, gave Trump one simple rule to guide his tweeting habit: Don’t comment online about the Russia investigation. “The message was, tweet about policy, tweet about politics, but don’t attack the special counsel,” recalled another former aide. None of the advice seemed to have any lasting effect on a president who views acting on his own impulses as a virtue. And these days, the staff has basically stopped trying: There is no character inhabiting the West Wing who is dispatched to counsel the president when he aims the powerful weapon of his Twitter feed at himself. On Nov 16, President Trump appeared to do just that.

After keeping silent for more than a week about mounting sexual misconduct allegations against Republican Senate candidate Roy Moore, the president weighed in on the sexual harassment claim against Sen Al Franken — a pair of tweets that drove a late-night news cycle but were greeted internally at the White House with a shrug and a yawn.