‘GET DAN SCAVINO IN HERE’

Trump Used Twitter Engagement Numbers to Argue for Syria Pullout: Report

Senior adviser for digital strategy was asked to show likes and retweets to help convince lawmakers to get behind plan that led Mattis to quit.

Dan Scavino, Donald Trump’s Twitter co-pilot, former golf caddie, and senior adviser for digital strategy at the White House, helped the president try to convince lawmakers that voters liked his surprise plan to pull all U.S. troops out of Syria based on likes and retweets. “Get Dan Scavino in here,” Trump reportedly called out in the middle of a meeting with legislators this year, according to a report published in Politico. “Tell them how popular my policy is,” Trump allegedly ordered Scavino. Though Trump eventually reversed course slightly on the policy—which he announced last December, leading Defense Secretary James Mattis to resign—Scavino has continued to use the president’s social-media engagement to bolster some of his more controversial decisions. Meanwhile, Trump has become more comfortable with sending out tweets himself, rather than dictating them to Scavino. But every tweet—no matter who sent it—reportedly has a consistent “presidential style”: that includes capitalizing the first letter of words like “collusion” and “witch hunt” in every Twitter post.