When President Biden (or someone with access to his Twitter account) posted his demand that gas stations lower their prices as a patriotic sacrifice, it didn’t go over very well. He immediately began catching flak from everyone from Jeff Bezos to the Chinese Communist Party. And that was for good reason because that’s not how gas stations work. But it didn’t stop there. Over the weekend, the US Oil & Gas Association got in on the action, seeming to openly mock the President’s message. But they also suggested that perhaps Biden himself wasn’t to blame. They suggested that a White House “intern” had sent the laughable tweet. (NY Post)

The US Oil & Gas Association mocked the Biden White House Sunday over a tweet ostensibly from the president that demanded the lowering of pump prices at once.

“Working on it Mr. President,” the industry group said in the snarky post. “In the meantime – have a Happy 4th and please make sure the WH intern who posted this tweet registers for Econ 101 for the fall semester…”

One day earlier, Biden had once again tried to pin the blame for record-high gas prices on alleged gouging by refiners following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

Working on it Mr. President. In the meantime – have a Happy 4th and please make sure the WH intern who posted this tweet registers for Econ 101 for the fall semester… https://t.co/6yLpbDDRKc

— US Oil & Gas Association (@US_OGA) July 3, 2022

Slipping in the phrase “the White House intern who posted this tweet” may have simply been a bit of added snark to layer onto their response. But I’ve now seen others on social media picking up the same theme. So is it possible? Would Team Biden actually give control of the President’s Twitter account to an intern?

Obviously, it’s not unusual for elected officials and private industry executives to hand off the chore of tweeting to someone else. And that includes presidents. Barack Obama had a standing rule where tweets coming from his account that he had written himself would have a “-bo” at the end. Other tweets were assumed to have been written by staffers. It has often been assumed that the President’s Press Secretary or some member of her staff would do a fair amount of the tweeting.

But anyone put in charge of those duties would need to be on top of all of the President’s current positions and policies to avoid any embarrassing contradictions or slip-ups. You would have to place a tremendous amount of trust in an intern to hand the Twitter wheel over to them. So that raises a question about how things are being run in Biden’s infamously secretive White House. Who actually operates the official Twitter account?

There are clearly several possibilities. Ron Klain comes to mind, particularly since plenty of people now believe that he’s actually running the country these days as it is. Or perhaps even one of Klain’s trusted staffers.

But what about Biden himself? Unlike Donald Trump, the 79-year-old Biden has never seemed particularly engaged with the technical side of the world. I went browsing through some of the White House’s photos of Biden and you rarely see him with a cell phone in his hand. (And when you do, someone else probably handed it to him.) Does Joe Biden really strike you as someone who would regularly be hunched over a cellphone, tapping out tweets on the virtual keyboard? I suppose anything is possible, but it doesn’t strike me as being likely. Trump, on the other hand, was up and banging out tweets at five in the morning.

And then there are Biden’s increasingly frequent “senior moments” where he appears to lose his place in the storyline. He sometimes forgets people’s names or calls them by the wrong name. If you were Ron Klain, would you want this guy tweeting anything unsupervised? I’m not entirely sure that they’ve even given Joe Biden the password to the account. That might be an interesting question for the White House press corps to ask the next time the Press Secretary gives a briefing. Has Joe Biden ever tweeted anything himself since taking office? Of course, I doubt any of them besides Peter Doocy would consider asking.