The answer is almost certainly no, but …
If you’ve been following the political news today, one joyously mocked aspect of Donald Trump’s latest Twitter rant early this morning has been that one of the tweets was apparently sent at 3:20 a.m.
I say apparently – despite the clearly visible 3:20 a.m. time-stamp – because Twitter time-stamps have been known to go haywire in the past, sometimes causing problems, such as when the bug made it appear that Alec Baldwin’s wife Hilaria had tweeted idle pleasantries during the June 2013 funeral of Sopranos star James Gandolfini. Hilaria had done no such thing, but erroneous reports to the contrary sparked by the bug caused her husband to blow a gasket.
Reuters Alec Baldwin and wife Hilaria in happier times.
(That Baldwin is set to portray Trump on Saturday Night Live is just a coincidence.)
Twitter had claimed to have eradicated the time-stamp bug, but I know for certain that it was still alive and well in October 2014 because it bit me.
So maybe Trump wasn’t really ranting online at 3:20 a.m.; maybe it was a civilized 12:20 a.m. or an early-bird 6:20 a.m. Maybe Trump is the real victim here.
Now I’m not saying that’s what happened – not at all -- because given a choice between Trump being the victim of a rare technological glitch that Twitter claims it has put down or Trump being up in the middle of the night venting his anger against the press, well, I’m betting the mortgage money on the latter.
All I’m saying is that if Trump or someone from his campaign – perhaps fearing that 3:20 a.m. tweeting isn’t a good look for a would-be president – was to offer up the time-stamp thing as an explanation, you couldn’t automatically dismiss the notion as you might if he said his account had gotten hacked.
(UPDATE: Trump confirms his 3 a.m. tweeting is a feature not a bug.)