Trump Tweets At Nordstrom For Dropping Ivanka During Intel Briefing [Opinion]

President Donald Trump just can’t seem to divorce himself from his multiple conflicts of interest. After learning that upscale retailer Nordstrom had decided to drop his daughter Ivanka’s brand, Trump took to Twitter on his personal account to express his displeasure with them. He accused Nordstrom of treating Ivanka “unfairly,” but the vast majority of Twitter users are unsympathetic.

My daughter Ivanka has been treated so unfairly by @Nordstrom. She is a great person — always pushing me to do the right thing! Terrible!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) February 8, 2017

Actor Kal Penn, who recently raised hundreds of thousands of dollars on behalf of Syrian refugees after a Trump supporter told him he did not belong in the United States, pointed out that the new president sent out this tweet just 21 minutes after he was scheduled for an intelligence briefing. This has led to speculation that Trump was more interested in his daughter’s business than he is in national and international security issues. And it is this speculation that is making folks wonder just how much (or little) Trump cares for the American people.

White House schedule says his Daily Intelligence Briefing was at 10:30am. This was the tweet he sent at 10:51am. ? https://t.co/THnW6IQ8G9

— Kal Penn (@kalpenn) February 8, 2017

The fact that Trump was filling his Twitter feed with angry tweets about Nordstrom just 21 minutes after his intelligence briefing started brings up another interesting facet of Trump’s social media habit. It is the fact that President Donald Trump’s Twitter account likely has multiple users. That is, according to AI (artificial intelligence) machine learning programs.

According to a report from AI analytics firm Receptiviti, Trump’s tweets were split between an Android device and an iPhone, which had very different tones and patterns. Data scientist David Robinson analyzed the texts of Trump’s tweets last August and came to an interesting conclusion. Tweets from the iPhone were friendly and benign — more likely to post tweets with embedded photos or links — while tweets from the Android device were reliably more angry and aggressive, with ad hominem attacks the norm.

But users don’t always need to have AI tell them who is doing the tweeting. When everyday users read tweets, certain devices will show the details of each post, such as the type of device the tweet originated from. In this case, it appears that the Nordstrom tweet originated from an iPhone. Trump uses a Samsung Galaxy, an Android device, so this indicates that he didn’t send the tweet himself, but dictated it to what another Twitter user called “cowering, helpless staff.” Does this make Trump’s Twitter tantrum any better? Absolutely not. In fact, it shows the general public just where his biggest loyalties lie, and it is not with the American people. It is with his and his family’s own business interests.

Bloomberg reports that last week, Nordstrom was one of Ivanka Trump’s earliest supporters of her brand, but due to low sales, had decided not to pick it up for another season. WWD reports that some speculation floated around that dropping Ivanka’s brand was related to a company-wide pro-immigration email Nordstrom’s co-presidents sent out. However, a company spokeswoman denied the claim, again citing poor sales of the Ivanka Trump brand.

“Last week our co-presidents sent an email to all Nordstrom employees to offer support and resources for those directly impacted by the executive order on immigration. Some news outlets have claimed that email was linked to the business decision to move away from Ivanka Trump brand. That’s not accurate. For us, the two were not connected.”

The question of who sent Trump’s infuriated tweet defending Ivanka’s business interest against Nordstrom is less troubling than the fact that even some of his own staff lack confidence in his ability to perform his job as the president of the United States. A recent story bythe Inquisitr revealed that White House staff had created an anonymous Twitter account to resist him and to disclose the inner workings and chaos in the new Trump administration.

Ivanka’s brand has likely suffered due to a number of reasons, one of which has been an ongoing boycott of her brand in protest of her father. ShopStyle, a fashion search engine, noted that when major partners no longer carry a certain brand, they remove it from their database. According Yahoo News, luxury retailer Neiman Marcus has also dropped Ivanka’s jewelry line amid a vigorous boycott by the leaders of the #GrabYourWallet campaign.

Donald Trump’s misplaced anger at Nordstrom for dropping Ivanka’s brand does no favors to his administration or to his daughter. The man is now the president of the United States, and his first priority should be to the American people, not to corporations, not to his family’s business, and not to foreign interests. Whether Trump personally sent out these tweets is irrelevant in the greater scheme of things. His personal Twitter feed should be related to good, positive PR, not vitriol aimed at people or corporations who hurt his feelings. And no one, not even his staff, should be tweeting anything from his personal Twitter handle while the president is in the middle of intelligence briefings.

[Featured image by Evan Vucci/AP Images]