Hello and welcome to The Spectator's Americano podcast, a special series of discussions about the biggest political event of this year, the 2016 US presidential election.

My name is Freddie Gray and I'm Deputy Editor of the Spectator.

Today I'm joined down the line by Jay Arthur Bloom, who is managing editor of Frontport Republic

and founder of the Meet Hayuz, which is a newsletter. And we're going to be talking about

Trump, Twitter and the age of the political unreal. Arthur, I think it's fair to say that

the Trump presidency away from Twitter has been surprisingly sane, albeit with pretty Trumpist touches,

but then there's been this carrying on of Donald Trump's tweeting, which is fairly mad,

and generates a lot of excitement, outrage, and hostility.

Is that a fair assessment of what's been happening with Trump and his Twitter account?

Yeah, absolutely.

There's no question that the statements he makes there are definitely wilder, more unhinged.

He's definitely trying to get a rise out of people.

The sort of thing that people have started to speculate about, though, is whether or not he's

using his Twitter account to sort of screen things he'd rather not be talking about.

Like about a week ago, it was the Hamilton fiasco that Mike Pence's vice presidential nominee

was yelled at during Hamilton, and then Trump sent out a tweet saying, you know, that was very

rude and all this. And then there was, so the speculation

about that is that he was weighing in on this controversy to avoid talking about or deflect

attention from the settlement in the Trump University case where he actually paid out several

million dollars. Yes. And there have been other examples, too, of him saying something

outrageous, you know, about the one Brits were very

interested in was him suggesting Farage should be our ambassador. And that generates a lot of

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